Jo Perry

“One of the first effects of this hyper-democratization of data was to unmoor information from the context required to understand it. On the Internet, facts float about freely and are recombined more according to the preferences of intuition than the rules of cognition:”
― Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

“In the fall of 2004, after both WMDs and easy victory were revealed as mirages, a presidential aide made an astounding admission to The New York Times Magazine. The White House, he said, didn’t waste time worrying about those “in what we call the reality-based community” who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” That, the aide said, “is not the way the world really works anymore. . . . When we act, we create our own reality.”
― Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

“Don't worry if you're having a hard time following this oversimplified explanation of physics' most challenging problem. For most of us, understanding special relativity is a little like true love: We should consider ourselves lucky if we can grasp hold of it for even one fleeting moment.”
― Seth Mnookin, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear

“She gave me the slow nod women use to indicate that they understand our pain, they admire the courage with which we handle it, and they're absolutely certain that it's all our fault.”
― Timothy Hallinan, Crashed