“Making space for another viewpoint does not negate yours. Quite the opposite — it provides more context and framework for your own experience.” (Kiara Goodwin, The Everygirl)

Meg Guliford on being a black grad student right now: “I’m disappointed with and disheartened by the institutional expectation that pressing forward with little interruption while trying to process all this heartbreak is healthy.”

“Perhaps one of the strangest sensations I’ve encountered, poised on the brink of motherhood, is the fact that even though I am reading copiously about babies and parenthood, I don’t know anything more than I did before.”

“I struggle with thoughts about how I would live my life if I knew I had only days. We all ask ourselves that question at some point. But seriously, pause for a minute, move past the cliché of that question, and think about it.”

“Politics isn’t the most important thing. A supreme court nomination isn’t the most important thing. The most important thing, when stories like this are in the news, is the victim, and how we treat them, how we speak about them.”

“These ‘rules’ have shown impressive staying power. From cocktail parties to kitchen tables, these seemingly fascinating bits of grammar trivia have been repeated over and over, in some cases for centuries. Too bad they’re not true.”

Journalist Natalia Antonova on writing about abuse: “Being vulnerable is not just about opening up to other people — it’s about opening up to yourself. Knowing yourself. Knowing what you are actually capable of.”

Michael Moreci on what science fiction can teach us about ourselves: ” . . . sci-fi possesses the unique ability to instruct and inform, to subtly—or, at times, not-so-subtly—act as a warning of what happens to worlds overrun with inequality, with war, and with hate.”

“But in cooking an egg, Le Guin shows us the beauty of difficult things: the things we do not to survive, not because we must, but because we’re challengingly, gloriously alive.”

“But there’s also the passive sexism — the status quo — that people have trouble seeing or don’t think they engage in until they catch themselves doing it because it’s so ingrained, that we also desperately need to fix.”

“These babushkas survived Stalin and the Nazis. . . . How can they be expected to fear something neither male nor foreign, that does not even have feral teeth, but whose only crime is that it breathes and disappears into the same air.”

“We are superficially more connected than ever before but we don’t feel any better […]. It is up to us to realise self-love doesn’t stem from a selfie and emojis will never qualify as real emotions.”

“The human race was not, in fact, exterminated in the late 1990s, as the film portends—but we have been doing our damnedest ever since to make sure it is.”

“Stories are the reason we ever made it this far — as individuals, and as a species. Stories are powerful, like thunder and lightning.”

“Little things — things that used to be simple and all my own — became packaged and delivered out into the world. My life was ready to be consumed.”