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Mara

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Mara is Currently Reading

Mara is currently reading

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

by John Green (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading, 2025-reads, history, library-books, non-fiction, science

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Dec 22, 2025 01:44AM

Mara’s Notes & Highlights

Book cover for Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code

Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin

2 notes & 14 highlights

To be unmarked by race allows you to reap the benefits but escape responsibility for your role in an unjust system.

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See Mara’s 7 books with notes and highlights…

“Being polite means following a conversation, not co-opting it and dragging it in other directions. It means knowing who you’re talking with, and knowing what they know. It’s rude to talk over people, to misunderstand who they are. Those maxims happen to neatly map to the same design principles laid out by Don Norman, and the ones that guided Brian Lathrop in the creation of Audi’s self-driving A7.”
― Robert Fabricant, User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play

tags: design, technology, user-experience

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“Whether we’re communicating with a human or a machine, the goal is to create a shared understanding of the world. That’s the point behind both the rules governing polite conversation and how a user-friendly machine should work.”
― Cliff Kuang, User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play

tags: design, design-thinking, human-computer-interaction, user-experience, user-friendly

3 likes

“Simple as it sounds, that bit of information means the difference between feeling like you’re taking a ride, and feeling like you’ve been taken hostage.”
― Cliff Kuang, User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work, and Play

tags: autonomous-driving, technology, user-experience

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“[O]ffenses like disorderly conduct, obstruction, and resisting arrest are easily alleged, they effectively give police the power to arrest based on violations of their own sense of authority.”
― Alexandra Natapoff, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal

tags: criminal-justice, police, police-state

2 likes

“Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.”
― Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

tags: race, racism

31 likes

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