If, as I have been convinced, the point of life and the meaning of freedom is to make something with what the world makes of you, then it’s necessary to locate those places where history reaches through your self and sticks you to the board.

The genius study was a story, and many powerful people worked hard to make it come true.

What haunts are the kinds of large historical crimes that, once committed, can never truly be set right.

Instead of cycling with the seasons, mining moved linearly, exponentially, cumulatively. There is no such thing as enough gold.

propagation of the species and are not destined for anything else,” Jordan declared in one of his evolution lectures, quoting the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, “they live, as a rule, more for the species than for the individual, and in their hearts take the affairs of the species more seriously than those of the individual.”27

People aren’t puppets, and to pull a person is to create the conditions for rebellion.

Bay Area Indians enjoyed an outstandingly diverse diet based on seasonal community rotation. Nomadic in the sense of not having permanent constructed dwellings, the Ohlone moved in response to abundance rather than scarcity, and individual communities maintained small, consistent territories. Natural cycles of ripening and spawning dictated short p

They wanted to sell as much as possible at as high a price as possible. But if all the producers in a marketplace try to grow and harvest as much as possible, they will oversupply the market, tank the price, and kill their profits. If a group of producers agree to restrain output in order to maintain a profitable level of scarcity, on the other han

Settler colonialists seized and enclosed agricultural lands around the world, forcing peasant and indigenous communities into capitalist work, whether waged, enslaved, or (most prevalent) somewhere desperate in between.