Christopher Ryan

Author. Podcaster. Loves humans, unimpressed by humanity.
Carpe diem, but don't be fanatical about it.

[Christopher Ryan @ThatChrisRyan]

Disagreement is not betrayal.

[Christopher Ryan @ThatChrisRyan]

Let's use it for migrant kids!

[Christopher Webb @cwebbonline]

Trump is floating the idea of leaving the UFC cage in front of the White House, comparing it to the Eiffel Tower. 🤦🏽‍♂️

His brain is turning to mush.

[Christopher Ryan @ThatChrisRyan]

Platner flirted with women when he was married! Heaven help us!

[Christopher Ryan @ThatChrisRyan]

@Aella_Girl People have no idea what the average quality of life is/was for h/g. Every society propagandizes itself. Read Sahlins.

[Christopher Ryan @ThatChrisRyan]

@marknorm Or an airplane as a "write off."

[Christopher Ryan @ThatChrisRyan]

I mean, what's the point of raging against the dying of the light? You'll just ruin the experience.

[Christopher Ryan @ThatChrisRyan]

I think there's a lot to be said for going gentle into that good night.

[Christopher Ryan @ThatChrisRyan]

@renabaddie_ 45. easy.

[Christopher Ryan @ThatChrisRyan]

@Aella_Girl @Etanarachel I wish there were more anthropological research into how "rape" is conceptualized in cultures that don't connect sex with pregnancy.

[Thrilla the Gorilla @ThrillaRilla369]

If you can't tax rich people on the unrealized gains from stocks then why do property taxes on middle class folks keep going up based on the unrealized value of a house?

[Christopher Ryan @ThatChrisRyan]

@warsurv The inane futility of the boats spraying water on the burning water is symbolic of our age.

[Meacham @MeachamDr]

It’s like a meth family moved in….

[Dr Rahmeh Aladwan @doctor_rahmeh]

White phosphorus ignites instantly on contact with oxygen. It burns at over 800°C. It melts through clothing, skin, muscle — and bone.

In the bloodstream, it becomes a systemic poison. It attacks the heart, liver, and kidneys leading to multi‑organ failure and death.

Monsters.

[Tonch @Tonch_MS]

"Designated free speech pen" is definitely a phrase that happens in a free country

[Christopher Ryan @ThatChrisRyan]

It's a good time to be a pitchfork manufacturer.

[Christopher Ryan @ThatChrisRyan]

@BarneysRubble0 If you can get great musicians to pay you lots of money for your insights into their music, you've got something going on.

[Christopher Ryan @ThatChrisRyan]

If it requires a daily reminder, it's probably not true.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Being biologically female means having a body that is observably organised to produce large gametes (eggs), as opposed to a body organised to produce small gametes (sperm). A woman is female whether her eggs have been fertilised or not. A man can never be female.

[Dr. M.F. Khan @Dr_TheHistories]

Inside the camp, the pea crop had frozen. There was no work. Families were starving. Lange found a thirty-two-year-old woman sitting in a lean-to tent with her children, and something in her face stopped Lange cold. "I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions."

Lange made five exposures, working closer and closer. The photograph she took that day -- of Florence Owens Thompson, a Cherokee woman and mother of seven, gazing past the camera with a look of exhausted resolve -- became one of the most reproduced images of the twentieth century. Within days of its publication in the San Francisco News, the federal government rushed 20,000 pounds of food to the camp.

A single photograph had fed thousands of people. Lange understood this power better than anyone. "The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera," she said. And she understood its limits: "Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still."

Then came the war, and the internment, and the photographs the Army did not want America to see. Lange had been awarded the Guggenheim in 1941 -- the first woman in the history of photography to receive one. After Pearl Harbor, she gave it up without hesitation to document what she recognized as an injustice unfolding in real time. She traveled across California, photographing Japanese American families as they were forced from their homes -- the bewildered faces, the numbered tags, the piles of luggage on sidewalks, the shuttered storefronts with signs reading "I Am An American."

The Army suppressed every image. A military officer stamped "Impounded" across the prints. They were filed in the National Archives and not seen by the public until after the war ended.

Lange spent her remaining decades traveling the world with her second husband, the economist Paul Taylor, photographing people and communities for Life magazine and other publications. She co-founded Aperture, the influential photography journal. Her body, weakened by the polio of her childhood and years of grueling fieldwork, began to fail. She was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 1964.

Dorothea Lange died on October 11, 1965, at the age of seventy. Three months later, the Museum of Modern Art opened the first major retrospective of her work. She never saw it.

"One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind," she once said. "To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it."

But she had done far more than touch it. Dorothea Lange had taught a nation to see the people it had been looking past -- the hungry, the displaced, the imprisoned, the invisible -- and in doing so, she had made it impossible to look away.

[Christopher Ryan @ThatChrisRyan]

@paulg @snowmaker "Never trust anyone who says, 'Trust me.'"

[Christopher Ryan @ThatChrisRyan]

@bitsandscraps This from the guy who thought competitive slapping was a good idea.

[Christopher Ryan @ThatChrisRyan]

@missmayn Where else do we tax unrealized capital gains? Let's tax billionaires on stocks they haven't sold.