updated 4d ago
Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession
I want us to wonder what stories we’re most hungry for, and why; to consider what forms our fears take; and to ask ourselves whose pain we still look away from.
from Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe
Tara McMullin added 8d ago
they weren’t the only ones warping my sense of reality—it was also the many flavors of online Nazi, the school shooters and the girls who longed to love them, the edgelords and their aggressive brooding, cranky old Ayn Rand—all these various manifestations of a worldview that insisted what mattered most was power, and that getting attention gave yo
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Tara McMullin added 8d ago
Nothing makes people more righteous than feeling they are in possession of a truth that others don’t want to hear.
from Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe
Tara McMullin added 8d ago
Since 1980, when the victims’ rights movement took off, higher-education spending in California has decreased by 13 percent, while investment in prisons has grown 436 percent; the state now spends far more money on prisons than it does on colleges and universities.
from Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe
Tara McMullin added 8d ago
It takes so little for us to shut ourselves off from someone else’s suffering—all he has to do is be wearing the wrong team’s jersey. Human beings are such good othering machines, so talented at dividing up the world into who matters and who doesn’t.
from Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe
Tara McMullin added 8d ago
This low-key, ambient paranoia—this conviction that no place was secure and that any moment could tip into cataclysm—was a new feature of my consciousness, but it was lodged so firmly that I worried it was here to stay.
from Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe
Tara McMullin added 8d ago
In Bloom’s book, he repeatedly compares empathy to a spotlight: “It makes visible the suffering of others, makes their troubles real, salient, and concrete. From the gloom, something is seen.” But a spotlight is a limited instrument. It illuminates, but only narrowly. Its light is so bright that you can forget how much it leaves in the dark.
from Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe
Tara McMullin added 8d ago
“Mean world syndrome” was a theory developed in the 1970s by a professor of communications named George Gerbner. Gerbner argued that the more media people consumed, the more likely they were to believe that the world was a dangerous place; in the decades since, a number of studies have borne out Gerbner’s conclusions. Mean world syndrome is one exp
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Tara McMullin added 8d ago
Yet there are so many ways that people can mess things up, so many ways our human tendencies toward bias, sloppiness, error, and fraud can get in the way. Ultimately, we’re such bad detectives, at least by the standards of my young self. We haven’t figured out how to see without being seen. We’re far from all-powerful. We fail at omniscience. Even
... See morefrom Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe
Tara McMullin added 8d ago