Charms in the Island by Aldous Huxley

Island by Aldous Huxley || Goodreads || Amazon

Aldoux Huxley, for those who might not remember, is the writer of Brave New World (one of my favorite dystopian novels). An English writer who lived from 1894 to 1963 and wrote more than 50 books! 

If you read Brave New World, then the Island definitely feels familiar in some places (although one is dystopian and the other is utopian), but it's generally not repetitive and pretty interesting. Huxley wrote Brave New World 30 years before writing the Island and they were both during vastly different places in his life. In fact, Island is the last book he published and he wrote it after he was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer. 

The Island follows the story of Will Farnaby, an English journalist who is (intentionally) shipwrecked on the Island of Pala. He is there to convince the Rani (the queen of the island) to sell their oil to Joe Aldehyde, a British Lord. There is also Murugan, the prince of the island who will assume power in a few days when he becomes of age. Both Murugan and the queen were raised outside of Pala, so they are highly westernized and dislike Palanese culture. The Rani believes she is on a divine mission and that everyone on the island is misguided, while Murugan can’t wait to sell out and ‘modernize’ the island with fancy automobiles and all sorts of other material luxury goods. 

In reality, Pala is way ahead of its time. The Palanese seem to have achieved perfect living practices to prosper as a community. They have the best of both worlds as they tap into western knowledge, literature, and scientific innovations, but infuse it into their own systems of eastern education and spirituality. Someone in the book observes, “So long as it [Pala] remains out of touch with the rest of the world, an ideal society can be a viable society,” however, in the post-WWII era they are living in, that is not an easy task, and the Palanese know that the future doesn’t hold much kindness for them.

Will is not an initially likable protagonist, though he somewhat grows on you. A description that Dr. Robert gives of him early on is very fitting, “The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act and his feelings would like to believe; but his nerve endings and his cleverness won’t allow it.”

He is cynical and apathetic and repeats several times in the book that he won’t take yes for an answer. He is highly skeptical about the utopian character of the island, and it takes a long time for the Palanese to wear him down. He is stubborn about his cynicism and so staunch in his belief that the Palanese are doomed that after seeing, first-hand, the ecstasy of a youth who praises the yoga of love, Will observes, “It was profoundly touching. But he refused to be touched. Noli me tangere—it was a categorical imperative.”

Throughout most of his stay in Pala, he hangs unto his “Gray Life” plague, his paranoia, and his disbelief in the possibility of good. He is proud and angst-ridden in a cliche way. He needs help but will never “stoop that low” to ask for it. But towards the end of the story, he reaches a level of self-awareness that endears him to the reader. He sees his before-Pala self as a “muddy filter” and describes it as, “The poor idiot hadn’t wanted to take yes for an answer in any field but the aesthetic. And all the time he had been denying, by the mere fact of being himself, all the beauty and meaning he so passionately longed to say yes to. ”

Although as a character he is not immediately likable, as a literary hero, he is brilliantly written. Huxley describes a scene for example, “Will questioned with that innocent air of total ignorance which he had found by long experience to be the best way of eliciting information from the simpleminded and the self-important.”

And because we see the island through the lens of Will, despite having a third person omniscient narrator, this wit seeps into the descriptions of the other characters. A good depiction of the Rani and Murugan is as follows:

“Murugan, meanwhile, had pushed up a chair. Without so much as a backward glance—regally confident that someone must always, in the very nature of things, be at hand to guard against mishaps and loss of dignity—the Rani sat down with all the majestic emphasis of her hundred kilograms.”

Another equally humorous passage:

“Doctor’s orders are doctor’s orders,” cried the Rani, overacting the role of royal personage deigning to be playfully gracious.

One of the things in the book that I loved conceptually were the mynah birds. The islanders have trained local birds to repeat “Attention” and “Here and now!” because, as Mary Sarojini explains, “That’s what you always forget, isn’t it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what’s happening. And that’s the same as not being here and now.”

Palanese philosophy is ever-present in the book and I highlighted a lot of things because they seemed like generally useful principles to live by. For example, in one section, Susila is explaining to Will why it’s important to understand what it means to truly love someone and she says, “Because I always have the same name and the same nose and eyes, it doesn’t follow that I’m always the same woman. Recognizing that fact and reacting to it sensibly—that’s part of the Art of Loving.”

Some other gems:

• “It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet still be here, on the spot, with the living.”
• “When in doubt,” said Dr. Robert, “always act on the assumption that people are more honorable than you have any solid reason for supposing they are. ”
• “[O]ne has no right to inflict one’s sadness on other people. And no right, of course, to pretend that one isn’t sad. One just has to accept one’s grief and one’s absurd attempts to be a stoic.”
• “Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very first that all living is relationship.”
• “Balance, give and take, no excesses—it’s the rule in nature and, translated out of fact into morality, it ought to be the rule among people.”
• “We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.”

One thing that I appreciate about Huxley is that although he is not a contemporary writer, he never feels inaccessible. On the contrary, I really enjoy his writing because not only is it witty and philosophical, but it also gets quite lyrical at times. For example, the second chapter of the book ends with, “so that the whole universe seemed to be fairly splitting its sides over the enormous joke of existence.”

Later in chapter four, we have, “There were daisies in the grass and dandelions, and across the water towered up the huge church, challenging the wildness of those soft April clouds with its austere geometry. Challenging the wildness, and at the same time complementing it, coming to terms with it in perfect reconciliation.”

And its philosophy, at times a little convoluted, is still profound. Will is given a booklet called,  “Notes on What's What, and What It Might be Reasonable to do about What's What” on Palanese philosophies in order for him to know “what always and everywhere has to be done by anyone who has a clear idea about what’s what.”

This booklet has charms like:

• “If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am.”
• “Knowing who in fact we are results in Good Being, and Good Being results in the most appropriate kind of good doing. But good doing does not of itself result in Good Being.”
• “[G]etting to know oneself to the point where one won’t be compelled by one’s unconscious to do all the ugly, absurd, self-stultifying things that one so often finds oneself doing.”

And of course, Huxley has pages full of criticisms on materialism, consumerism, organized religion, obligatory suffering, codependence in relationships, and nuclear families. And for the most part, they are quite poignant social commentaries. 

For the Palanese (and Huxley), “Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse.”

One ruthless recipe Susila gives of the European family is, “Take one sexually inept wage slave,” she went on, “one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice.” In contrast, the Palanese recipe for a happy family is, “Take twenty sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; add science, intuition and humor in equal quantities; steep in Tantrik Buddhism and simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection.”

And some other pointed monologues about the lack of thinking and reason, the focus on medications and not cures, the emphasis on theory but the lack of practical implications, use of propaganda and Pavlovian techniques for brainwashing and benefiting tyrants rather than encouraging compassion and trust etc. etc. 

Some similarities that I caught between the Island and the Brave New World:

• Drug use – in one, it’s a tool for enlightenment, in the other it’s for pacifying people
• Big families — in one, it’s to have healthier children with more outlets and role models, in the other it’s to erase individual thinking
• Free contraception — in one, it’s to encourage free sexual expression and agency, in the other it’s to increase hedonism and promiscuity 
• Omnipresent slogans – in one, the mynah birds encourage mindfulness and compassion, in the other hypnopædia is used to indoctrinate children

Overall, I would definitely recommend it as a book, and encourage you to also read Brave New World if you haven't. The experience can be eye-opening and awe-inspiring at the same time. 

Charms in The Righteous Mind

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt (Amazon // Goodreads)

This book was recommended to me by a friend who had to witness me complaining about all the New Atheist genre books such as Dawkins’s The God Delusion.  I read it over my winter break and as you can see, I have procrastinated greatly on writing this review, mainly because I was intimidated by how many things I had to say and all the notes I took while reading it. I thought I would have to spare a good three hours to get through everything I wanted to talk about. 

But I am on spring break now, and I can dedicate a good block of my time to finishing this, and then actually getting the book back to its owner (who has been surprisingly kind about letting me keep the book for this long). I am also using a new application I found called Writer’s Block which blocks me from using my computer until I reach my word count goal. 

My general thoughts on the book are positive but still somewhat ambivalent. I liked it. I enjoyed reading it for the most part. It was intellectually stimulating and raised some questions I hadn’t asked myself before. The writing strikes a nice balance between simplicity and complexity as Haidt works with a lot of scientific data and terminology, and he does a good job of getting his point across and synthesizing his findings. He has organized the chapters and sections really well, and he refreshes the reader’s memory in each chapter with formal conclusions at the end, and small referrals throughout the section. There is a lot going on in the book however, and although the main text is understandable, a considerable amount of contextual information is in the last hundred pages of footnotes which made the reading a chore. I couldn’t read a full page without at least three footnotes and going to the back of the book every other paragraph to see what he was leaving out or what he was referencing. 

Now… Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty and the hyper analysis that was bound to happen when I read a book like this. 

“I want to show you that an obsession with righteousness (leading inevitably to self-righteousness) is the normal human condition.”

This is a statement from Haidt’s introduction. The beautiful thing that happened when I was reading this book is that I went to a religious retreat (which I will write about in detail in a separate post) and quite a few of the themes that were explored in this book were paralleled in our religious discussion (such a nice God given coincidence). We explicitly talked about self-righteousness and what leads us to have a strong need for it. It’s really not a foundational part of being human. It has other roots. As far as I have been convinced. 

“Rationality is our nature, and good moral reasoning is the end point of development.”

“Specific rules may vary across cultures [… but] children still made a distinction between moral rules and conventional rules.”

“When you put individuals first, before society, then any rule or social practice that limits personal freedom can be questioned. If it doesn’t protect somebody from harm, then it can’t be morally justified. It’s just social convention.”

“It was reasoning as described by the philosopher David Hume, who wrote in 1739 that ‘reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’”

“Jefferson gives us a third option, in which reason and sentiment are (and ought to be) independent co-rulers, like the emperors of Rome, who divide the empire into eastern and western halves.”

“Do people believe in human rights because such right actually exist, like mathematical truths, sitting on a cosmic shelf next to the Pythagorean theory just waiting to be discovered by Platonic reasoners? Or do people feel revulsion and sympathy when they read accounts of torture, and then invent a story about universal rights to help justify their feelings?”

“Yet the result of the separation [between the rational soul and the seething passions of the body] was not the liberation of reason from the thrall of the passions. It was the shocking revelation that reasoning /requires/ the passions. Jefferson’s model fits better: when one co-emperor is knocked out and the other tries to rule the empire by himself, he’s not up to the task.”

Jefferson’s model requires an in-depth analysis of the idea of co-emperors. Or two leaders in any situation having equal power. 

“So Hume’s model fits these cases best: when the master (passions) drops dead, the servant (reasoning) has neither the ability nor the desire to keep the estate running. Everything goes to ruin.”

“Moral reasoning was just a post hoc search for reasons to justify the judgements people had already made.”

My main question throughout the book was, don’t we need initial reasoning to have the gut reaction? Haidt touches on genetics as a blueprint for some of our reasoning, but he doesn’t clarify if he thinks our gut reactions mean that there is a pan-human morality built into everyone. Do people innately have a sense of what is right and what is wrong in its most basic form? And if yes, they do, then what does that say about morality’s universality?

“I can’t call for the community to punish you simply because I don’t like what you’re doing. I have to point to something outside my own preferences, and that pointing is our moral reasoning.”

“We maker first judgements rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgements.”

I agree, but I think this makes it sound like people never question their own beliefs. While it is easier to just keep on believing what we already believe in, I think it’s also not that hard to always be conscious of our thoughts and beliefs, and continue questioning them. And people do this. Increasingly so – we are becoming more curious, more open, more doubtful. We are forced to confront our beliefs and habits as we live in an immensely integrated world with people who are different from us. 

“Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to emphasize across a moral divide.”

“The mind is divided into parts, like a rider (controlled processes on an elephant (automatic processes). The rider evolves to serve the elephant.”

One thing I hated about this book: this analogy. It made no sense, it still makes no sense, and it was used almost every other paragraph. Haidt is very proud of it, but oh man. 

“Deontologists talk abut high moral principles derived and justified by careful reasoning; they would never agree that these principles are merely post hoc rationalizations of gut feelings. But Greene had a hunch that gut feelings were what often drove people to make deontological judgments, whereas utilitarian judgements were more cool and calculating.”

“Glaucon’s thought experiment implies that people are only virtuous because they fear the consequences of getting caught – especially the damage to their reputations. Glaucon says he will not be satisfied until Socrates can prove that a just man with a bad reputation is happier than an unjust man who is widely thought to be good.”

Food for thought – I immediately thought about Quran (4:135) "O you who have believed, be persistently standing firm in justice, witnesses for Allah , even if it be against yourselves or parents and relatives. Whether one is rich or poor, Allah is more worthy of both. So follow not [personal] inclination, lest you not be just. And if you distort [your testimony] or refuse [to give it], then indeed Allah is ever, with what you do, Acquainted." Yes, sometimes it’s unpopular to be just, sometimes it challenges the status quo and those in power, sometimes it’s dangerous, but people still do it. People still stand up for justice, people who are demonized and blacklisted, they stand up for what’s right, and they are happy. 

“What, then, is the function of moral reasoning? Does it seem to have been shaped, tuned, and crafted (by natural selection) to help us find the truth, so that we can know the right way to behave and condemn  those who behave wrongly? If you believe that, then you are a rationalist, like Plato, Socrates, and Kohlberg. Or does moral reasoning seem to have been shaped, tuned, and crafted to help us pursue socially strategic goals, such as guarding our reputations and convincing other people to support us, or our team, in disputes? If you believe that, then you are Glauconian.”

I don’t know which school I fit into yet. I don’t think I ascribe to either of them fully enough. 

“But when people know in advance that they’ll have to explain themselves, they think more systematically and self-critically. They are less likely to jump to premature conclusions and more likely to revise their beliefs in response to evidence.”

This, I think, shows why a very fundamentally beneficial part of religions and belief systems with gods that are omniscient and all-seeing. Even when we are inclined to do something wrong that no person might see, we are still aware that God sees everything, and that we’ll have to own up to that action and answer for it. 

“[…] accountability pressures simply increase confirmatory thought. People are trying harder to look right than be right.”

I think this is extremely crucial in religious questioning. When I started questioning my own beliefs, I knew I would do this, so I tried to approach my beliefs similarly to how I would approach a scientific hypothesis. Approach with the intent to disprove, and if it cannot be disproven, it stands. You move on to the next hypothesis and so on. Nobody likes to be wrong, but with something as important as belief, I think we have to be counterintuitive. We have to think slowly and critically.

“People are quite good at challenging statements made by other people, but if it’s your belief, then it’s your possession – your child, almost – and you want to protect it, not challenge it and risk losing it.” 

This is what higher institutions of learning try to teach us right? They encourage us to challenge our own beliefs, grow and adapt and improve. I wonder when the right age to begin this kind of training is most appropriate. Should we begin questioning norms and traditions earlier?

“Tomasello notes that a word is not a relationship between a sound and an object. It is an agreement among people who share a joint representation of the things in their world, and who share a set of conventions for communicating with each other about those things.”

“We evolved to live, trade, and trust within shared moral matrices. When societies lose their grip on individuals, allowing all to do as they please, the result is often a decree in happiness and an increase in suicide, as Durkheim showed more than a hundred years ago.”

&&&

Some other things I got out of this book:
1. Hang out with people who are different from you and who don’t share all your beliefs and opinions. There is growth in challenge. 
2. Most information can be twisted and presented as to make sense for all sides of an argument.  Thus, it’s essential for us to try to be as objective and unbiased as possible when approaching issues we care about. We tend to look for information that confirms what we already believe in but being aware that this is our natural inclination is the first step in avoiding it in the future.
3. Hierarchies aren’t inherently bad and exploitative but can exist harmoniously when there are certain expectations and responsibilities on all parties. Haidt says such hierarchies are similar to a parent-child relationship rather than a dictator-fearful underlings relationship. 
4. There are five main foundations that politicians use to connect to us. Left-wing morality only uses two of these, care and fairness, while right-wing morality encompasses all five, including the loyalty, authority, and sanctity foundations. We don’t know the full impact of this however, because despite having more ways to connect to the voters, right wingers remain somewhat equally tied to the left wingers in support (though Haidt believes that if left wingers start connecting to voters on more foundations it will help them get ahead).
5. There are people who think morality, altruism and generosity are mistakes. This is not news, I have written about Rand here before. Haidt argues that morality is the key to understanding humanity. And he argues this point well. 
6. New Atheists think religion costs us, but it’s actually one of the most persevering ways to solve the problem of fueling cooperation among people without kinship. 
7. Liberalism tries to change too many things too quickly all at once and it is one of the reasons why it has failed to create a stable governing philosophy. Conservatism does a better job of preserving moral capital but fails to see the need to change or update institutions as times change. The idea is that we need both to have a steadily improving and healthy state. Moderation is best indeed. 

And that concludes this 2000-word monster of a post. Thanks for sticking around, if you have, that is, and see you on the next book review slash opinion piece (or maybe vignette). 

Charms in Bad Feminist

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay (Amazon // Goodreads )

I bought this book over winter break and I am finally done with it. I had to take a break from reading it because I wasn’t really enjoying it, but the second time I picked it up, I was around 60 pages in, I finished it in a day and actually enjoyed it more than I was expecting to. I had thought that this review would turn out to be rather scathing but it’s going to be pretty appreciative, at least later on. 

During the first 50 or so pages of this book I was constantly thinking the author had good ideas but terrible delivery. The language sounded repetitive and fragmented, like Hemingway, but without the literary grace. This first part of the book, which focuses on the author herself, felt as though the humor was forced and superficial with phrases like, “I consulted Dr. Google regularly.” At some point I even had a fear that my style of writing was similar to that of Roxane Gay’s and people would react similarly to how I wrote.

I got over this, however, during the second part of my reading and the subsequent parts of the book. Gay brings forward a good and succinct representation of the immigrant and minority experience in America. She has good critique of privilege. She became more relatable as I kept reading – subtly and in unexpected ways.

She covers a variety of topics (gender, sexuality, race, entertainment, and politics) and how they all intersect in different ways. My favorite chapter in the book was “How to Be Friends with Another Woman.” She has 13 rules overall, and she starts with, “1. Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive. This myth is like heels and purses – pretty but designed to SLOW women down.” Her humor and writing style started appealing to me in this chapter. Her snark and biting critique continue from here onward (my favorite is when she rips apart 50 Shades of Gray in a later chapter). She makes important points about how women interact with other women and she does it in a way that doesn’t feel like she’s preaching. In fact,  to me, she becomes trustworthy in this chapter, when she tells us rule number 4, “Sometimes, your friends will date people you cannot stand. You can either be honest about your feelings or you can lie. There are good reasons for both. Sometimes you will be the person dating someone your friends cannot stand. If your man or woman is a scrub, just own it so you and your friends can talk about more interesting things. My go-to explanation is ‘I am dating an asshole because I’m lazy.’ You are welcome to borrow it.” She is honest and I don’t doubt it. She establishes this credibility. 

Another chapter I enjoyed and learned from was “Not Here To Make Friends.” Gay talks about likability and how the concept of likability is applied only to women and is a manifestation of the double standard in society’s expectations of behavior from men and women. She talks about likability in fiction especially, and how for works written by women authors with women heroes, discussion always includes the likability of the heroine and how this usually colors the literary critique of the work. How when men fit the same categories unlikable women fit, they are called antiheroes and interesting, but when women are in this position, they render the work uninteresting and not an ideal read. This is definitely a trap I fall into – I care if the characters in a book are likable or not, but my experience so far has been extreme irritation and boredom with the male antiheroes in literature. I’ll change this outlook nonetheless, it allows for a more in-depth and complex approach to whatever I am reading. 

Something I admire about Gay is that she’s not afraid to say she doesn’t know what to do to solve a certain problem. This isn’t really hard to do of course, some people own up to their lack of knowledge with pride and I think there is no need to overdo it. What sets Gay apart is that she doesn’t just repeat what problems we are facing and then declare she doesn’t know what to do. She manages to add detail and complexity to the debates we’re already having and sometimes proposes theories as to how we can approach these layered problems. But even when she has no idea, she has done something new. She has brought a fresh and eye-opening perspective to the table that can take us a step closer to finding the right way to deal with a problem. Through this, she is able to bring much-needed nuances to our discussions of things like “rape culture” and trigger warnings. 

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Some of the passages I liked in the book are:

“The problem is, cultural critics talk about privilege with such alarming frequency and in such empty ways, we have diluted the word’s meaning. When people wield the word “privilege,” it tends to fall on deaf ears because we hear that word so damn much it has become white noise.”

“What I remind myself, regularly, is this: the acknowledgement of my privilege is not a denial of the ways I have been and am marginalized, the ways I have suffered.”

“Too many people have become self-appointed privilege police, patrolling the halls of discourse, ready to remind people of their privilege whether those people have denied that privilege or not. In online discourse, in particular, the specter of privilege is always looming darkly. When someone writes from experience, there is often someone else, at the ready, pointing a trembling finger, accusing that writer of having various kinds of privilege. How dare someone speak to a personal experience without accounting for every possible configuration of privilege or the lack thereof? We would live in a world of silence if the only people who were allowed to write or speak form experience or about difference were those absolutely without privilege.”

“We put a lot of responsibility on popular culture, particularly when some pop artifact somehow distinguishes itself as not terrible. In the months and weeks leading up to the release of Bridesmaids, for example, there was a great deal of breathless talk about the new ground the movie was breaking, how yes, indeed, women are funny. Can you believe it? There was a lot of pressure on that movie. Bridesmaids had to be good if any other women-driven comedies had any hope of being produced. This is the set of affairs for women in entertainment – everything hangs in the balance all the time.”

“[…] women are often the brightly polished trophies in the display case of reality television. The genre has developed a very successful formula for reducing women to an awkward series of stereotypes about low self-esteem, marital desperation, the inability to develop meaningful relationships with other women, and an obsession with almost pornographic standards of beauty.”

“Disagreement, however, is not anger. Pointing out the many ways in which misogyny persists and harms women is not anger. Conceding the idea that anger is an inappropriate reaction to the injustice women face backs women into an unfair position. Nor does disagreement mean we are blind to the ways in which progress has been made. Feminists are celebrating our victories and acknowledging our privilege when we have it. We’re simply refusing to settle. We’re refusing to forget how much work there is yet to be done. We’re refusing to relish the comforts we have at the expense of the women who are still seeking comfort.”

“Perhaps we too casually use the term “rape culture” to address the very specific problems that rise from a culture mired in sexual violence. Should we, instead, focus on “rapist culture” because decades of addressing “rape culture” has accomplished so little?”

“How do you write violence authentically without making it exploitative? […] We cannot separate violence in fiction from violence in the world no matter how hard we try.”

“I knew things but I knew nothing about what a group of boys could do to kill a girl.”

“Just because you survive something does not mean you are strong.”

“This is the uncomfortable truth: everything is a trigger for someone. There are things you cannot tell just by looking at someone.”

“The illusion of safety is as frustrating as it is powerful.”

“I don’t believe people can be protected from their histories.”

“Despite our complex cultural climate and what needs to be done for the greater good, it is still an unreasonable burden that someone who is marginalized must bear an extra set of responsibilities. It is unfair that prominent cultural figures who come out have to forge these inroads on our behalf; they carry the hopes of so many on their shoulders. They stand up and are counted so that someday things might actually be better for everyone, everywhere, not just the camera - or radio-ready celebrities for whom coming out is far easier than most.”

“There are injustices great and small, and even if we can only fight the small ones, at least we are fighting.”

“Women’s fiction is often considered a more intimate brand of storytelling that doesn’t tackle the big issues found in men’s fiction.”

“Male readership shouldn’t be the measure to which we aspire. Excellence should be the measure, and if men and /the establishment/ can’t (or won’t) recognize that excellence, we should leave the culpability with them instead of bearing it ourselves. As long as we keep considering male readership the goal, we’re not going to get anywhere.”

“Many comedians are very proud of themselves for saying the things others are supposedly afraid to say. They are at the forefront of this culture of entitlement where we get to do anything, think anything, and say anything.”

“Time and time again, people of color are supposed to be grateful for scraps from the table. There’s this strange implication that we should enjoy certain movies or television shows simply because they exist.”

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“I approach most things in life with a dangerous level of confidence to balance my generally low self-esteem.”

“I have always enjoyed board games. I love rolling dice and moving small plastic or metal pieces around game boards. I collect Monopoly sets from around the world. I will play any game so long as there is a possibility I can win. I take games seriously. Sometimes I take them too seriously and conflate winning the Game of Life with winning at life.”

“I had no idea what it mean to be likable, though I was surrounded by generally likable people.”

“Every from a young age I understood that when a girl is unlikable, a girl is a problem. I also understood that I wasn’t being intentionally mean. I was being honest (admittedly, without tact), and I was being human. It is either a blessing or a curse that those are rarely likable qualities in a woman.”

“Being good is the best way to be bad.”