I’ve been reading a lot about global poverty for a current assignment. Katherine Boo is one of my favorites, and this particular sentence really punched me in the gut. From her 2009 New Yorker piece, Opening Night:
The fences insured against a time when a scavenger in Gautam Nagar might learn that a shot of rare Scotch consumed in ten minutes at the Sheraton’s ITC Maratha cost exactly as much as he earned in seven hundred fourteen-hour days picking up aluminum cans and used tampon applicators, and find that information too much to bear.”
Science & Story 