The future looks a bit bleak to me.

Of course, the more you read, the more you learn, and ultimately there is more information than you can ever use. The difficulty is that as an outsider, you know you're too ignorant for your own good, and so the urge to keep researching and *never* start writing is pretty strong.

The more you read about and immerse in a culture, the more it comes alive, and the more textured and nuanced and detailed and unstereotypable it becomes.

They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.

Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power.

Knowledge is always two-edged. For every benefit, there is hazard. For every good, evil.

Environmental science is telling us a lot about our future and what it could look like, whether we're talking about global warming (the current poster child for the environment) or a loss of genetic diversity in our food supplies, or the effects of low-dose chemicals on human development.