Notes & Quotes: The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

The following are my favorite quotes from John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet.

1. My brother, Hank, who started out his professional life as a biochemist, once explained it to me like this: As a person, he told me, your biggest problem is other people. You are vulnerable to people, and reliant upon them. But imagine instead that you are a twenty-first-century river, or desert, or polar bear. Your biggest problem is still people. You are still vulnerable to them, and reliant upon them.
2. I reread the work of my friend and mentor Amy Krouse Rosenthal, who'd died a few months earlier. She'd once written, "For anyone trying to discern what to do with their life: Pay attention to what you pay attention to. That's pretty much all the info you need."
3. 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."
4. With a song like a dying balloon and a penchant for attacking humans, the Canada goose is hard to love. But then again, so are most of us.
5. Like most other energy-intensive innovations, AC primarily benefits people in rich communities, while the consequences of climate change are borne disproportionately by people in impoverished communities.
6. 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. 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.
7. When you have the microphone, what you say matters, even when you're just kidding. It's so easy to take refuge in the "just" of just kidding. It's just a joke. We're just doing it for the memes. But the preposterous and absurd can still shape our understanding of ourselves and one another. And ridiculous cruelty is still cruel.
8. We live in hope--that life will get better, and more importantly that it will go on, that love will survive even though we will not. And between now and then, we are here because we're here because we're here because we're here.
9. Kurt Vonnegut wrote that one of the flaws in the human character "is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."
10. More land more water are devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass in the United States than to corn and wheat combined.
11. As the legendary driver Mario Andretti put it, "if everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough."
12. Tradition is a way of being with people, not just the people you're observing the traditions with now, but also all those who've ever observed them.
13. One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can't ever quite get rid of.
14. On the other side of monotony lies a flow state, a way of being that is just being, a present tense that actually feels present.
15. When I was a kid, I thought being a parent meant knowing what to say and how to say it. But I have no idea what to say or how to say it. All I can do is shut up and listen. Otherwise, you miss all the good stuff.
16. Cholera continues to spread and kill not because we lack the tools to understand or treat the disease as we did two hundred years ago, but because each day, as a human community, we decide not to prioritize the health of people living in poverty.
17. Almost everything turns out to be interesting if you pay the right kind of attention to it.
18. I've spent so much of my life wondering why I am here, feeling this ache behind my solar plexus that my life isn't for anything, that it doesn't mean anything, that the hurt hurts too much and the joy gives too little. But in the shade of the gingko tree, I'm able to feel, if only in moments, why I am here--that I am here to pay attention. I am here to love and to be loved, and to know and to not know.

Notes & Quotes: Gambler by Billy Walters

The following are my favorite quotes from Billy Walters's Gambler: Secrets from a Life at Risk:

1. My philosophy on life is simple: You come into this world with nothing, and you leave with nothing. So seize every opportunity to leave a legacy that might inspire others to make the most of their time on earth. At the end of the day, there are two people you can't bullshit--yourself and your maker. You will be judged by the way you've lived and by whether you've followed your servant's heart.
2. I had no battle plan, other than a determination to prove my worth to anyone who figured me a failure based on my clothes or country accent. My answer to the doubters and bullies was to get up every morning, throw the blinders on, and charge like Billy the bull. Head down, horns up, taking on the world, willing to go as hard and as far as needed to defend my dignity.
3. Gambling was simply a way of life in Kentucky. My friends bet on a daily basis as naturally as they ate supper. We played cards, shot pool, pitched pennies, shot dice, and wagered on racehorses and sports. Basically, we'd bet on anything that moved. We never gave a thought to gambling being immoral or illegal.
4. I learned early on that the auto business was different from factory work because of all the downtime. The secret to success in car sales was to stay busy 100 percent of the time. If there weren't potential buyers milling around, the other salesmen would goof off in the office by chewing the fat, playing cards, or reading magazines. I also learned something that would become a hallmark of my business career--the more information you accumulate, the more opportunities you create.
5. When matching up, my game plan was simple: one way or another I needed to get my opponent to agree to higher stakes than he was comfortable playing for. I wanted their ass puckered so tight you couldn't pound a flax seed up it. The tighter they were wound, I figured, the worse they would play.
6. Gamblers do win, and some can win for a period of time. Almost every one of them, however, eventually will lose.
7. You have to hold people accountable in this game. If beards got a sense that you were not atop your game, they would steal from you every chance they could.
8. From a pure financial standpoint, Desert Pines was one of my worst-performing investments. But it still stands as one of my proudest accomplishments.
9. I want to say up front: I'm sharing details about my system. Your model can be what you want it to be. But there are bedrock principles of sports wagering that are important to know regardless of the specific system you use or the size of your wagers.
10. You generally must pay an additional 10 percent to make the bet. So a $100 wager will cost you $110. This is called the "juice" or the "vig", from the Russian/Yiddish word vigorish. Because you have to pay that extra $10, it means you'll need to win 52.38 percent of the time to break even.
11. Being a good handicapper is, of course, essential to being a winning sports bettor.
12. Handicapping alone won't guarantee maximum success. It's only a part of my three-pronged plan; betting strategy and money management also are essential.
13. Ideally, you should not risk any more than 1 to 3 percent of your bankroll on any single bet.
14. Just being one of the guys came naturally to me. That's the way Grandmother raised me. It was "Yes sir" and "No sir" to guards and officials alike. Whatever street cred I earned on the inside was due to keeping my eyes open and my mouth shut. I waited my turn and didn't stand out. At the same time, I never backed down. In the end, I was just another con.
15. Bootstrappers share common traits, among them discipline, focus, and the ability to bounce back from failure.
16. Prison makes that course correction in your life. It puts everything in perspective, reminding you of the many things you otherwise took for granted and the things that actually matter.
17. As it stands today, prisons are breeding grounds for generations of criminals. Fathers and mothers who come out of prison with no hope cannot offer hope to their children. But those who learn trades and support their families are far more likely to raise children who have a greater vision for their lives.

Notes & Quotes: Citizen Outlaw by Charles Barber

The following are my favorite quotes from Charles Barber's Citizen Outlaw: One Man's Journey from Gangleader to Peacekeeper:

1. At age seven, [William] Outlaw so much admired one of the officers, a strapping man who would go on to become New Haven's first African-American police commissioner, that he wanted to become a policeman. But by age ten, Outlaw had seen the behavior of other officers, who took bribes and slept with the single moms, and he grew to hate everything about the New Haven police department.
2. At the heart of his story is an unrelenting paradox. It is a story of doing unremitting damage and then trying to undo that damage, which of course is not actually possible. But these days Outlaw relentlessly spends his hours undertaking the insurmountable task of trying to overturn what has already been done.
3. Even at his young age, Outlaw sensed that his father's rage was somehow misplaced. Sure, Outlaw had done something wrong; sometimes Outlaw himself believed he deserved punishment. But he could feel in his heart that there was no love behind his father's so-called discipline.
4. The framers of the public housing movement made a critical error as they conceived of their master plan: they prohibited tenants from owning their apartments, and therefore residents had little personal investment in the properties in which they lived. The buildings were owned by city authorities and often poorly maintained. The projects were frequently opened with great optimism and fanfare, but then quickly fell apart. And just as often, in creating the new projects, entire neighborhoods--many of them containing handsome historical structures alongside the squalid tenements--were razed. These processes created deep-seated feelings of dislocation and alienation among long-standing residents. In New Haven alone, 20 percent of the population was forced to move out of their homes between 1956 and 1974, all in the name of purported urban renewal and progress.
5. Research shows that gangs thrive in areas of wide income disparity, and Connecticut had among the highest income disparity in the United States.
6. Outlaw perfected this style of business in the gang's first two years, all before his sixteenth birthday. It powered the Jungle Boys into becoming the largest gang in New Haven, and made Outlaw a local celebrity wherever he went.
7. Just as he arrived, an explosive element came along that changed the New Haven--and American--drug scene forever. Cocaine.
8. A few weeks after [Len Bias's] death, both Republicans and Democrats forged the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which fundamentally transformed the law enforcement community's response to drug abuse from a rehabilitative approach to a punitive one. Soon afterward came further legislation, which called for new prisons and mandatory minimum sentences for drug violations. The new laws made punishments related to crack up to a hundredfold higher than for cocaine. Nancy Reagan, who led an anti-drug campaign from the White House, deemed the legislation a personal victory.
9. By the 1960s and 1070s, amid rising crime and high rates of criminal recidivism (nationally, about half of inmates released from prison were incarcerated again within three years), the Bureau of Prisons largely abandoned any interest in rehabilitation, replacing that ideal with the liberal use of solitary confinement and lockdowns.
10. The "Cure Violence" health model, originally developed by Dr. Gary Slutkin of the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health, identifies three principles employed to combat epidemics of disease and applies them to youth violence: 1. interrupt transmission of the disease; 2. reduce the risk of the highest-risk cases and; 3. change community norms.
11. In 2016, when a New Haven dealer was sent back to prison, he sold his cell phone to another dealer for $30,000. The contacts on his phone amounted to an instant book of business.
12. There was one thing that had not much changed upon Outlaw's return: the homicide rate. Twenty-two murders were perpetrated in New Haven in 2008; 12 in 2009; 23 in 2010, and an astonishing 34 in 2011, numbers that had not been seen since the 1980s. In 2010, not one of the murder victims in New Haven was white. 22 were black, and one was Hispanic. Twenty two of the 23 people killed were male. Between 2003 and 2015, among the 1225 victims of gunshot wounds treated at Yale New Haven Hospital, 84 percent were either black or Hispanic, and 93 percent were male. The statistics mirrored national numbers: black men comprise 6 percent of the United States population but half of all homicide victims. Five thousand black men perish in gunfire annually.