This book forces you to sit with the reality of labor in a way I really love for how uncomfortable it is. In the real world, we don't have magic that flays people to power our machines; we don't need it. Working people in far away countries we can't see is blight enough.

Even as a child, I had heard that there were children in countries far away from mine, making the things that make my life possible, make it convenient. I think a lot of people in the U.S. know this, but we don’t know what to do with it. I still don’t know what to do with it.

"What life had paid for this tea? To bring the leaves from their native range, to push the water through the pipes, to make it hot enough to sting her burned hands?" Who died for your tea? Who harvested your food? Who died for the computer I'm writing this on, for the cobalt inside it? If not now, then in decades and centuries past, building networks of trade and exploitation. We accept this violence because we don't have to see it. But many people don't; many people have fought and been killed for trying to do better and to make others do better. The wealthy create this system and uphold it for themselves, allowing us in the middle a sliver of the rewards so we don’t take revenge on them. And I think the only way to fix that is to return the exact same consideration they have shown to humanity.