Babies who throw up...

For black people, being around white people is sometimes like taking care of babies you don’t like, babies who throw up on you again and again, but whom you cannot punish, because they’re babies.

-- Hilton Als
"How Richard Pryor Became America’s Comic Prophet of Race"
The New Yorker
Sept. 13, 1999

"You've got to pick a pocket or two, boys..."

Every age treats its penal system as natural, inevitable, and regrettable. When men were hanged in the public square, intellectuals explained that the practice was as helpful to the hanged as it was instructive for the audience. [...] Public hangings were simply part of street life. Pickpockets attended the hangings of other pickpockets in order to pick pockets.

- Adam Gopnik
"Should We Abolish Prisons?"

The New Yorker

July 22, 2024