One of the things I try to do - and I always regret when I'm not doing it - is I try to read as much as possible as I'm consuming news.
Once you start worrying, it's hard to stop.
I love Gene Weingarten's feature writing with the passion of a thousand suns.
History contains heroes, but no one is a hero entirely, and no one is a hero for very long.
Ferguson shows the power of social media. This could have not been a story. Or it could have just been a local story. Or it could have been something that we saw only from a distance, through the usual filters. Instead, it gathered steam.
Journalists run many risks. It comes with the profession.
It is possible to assemble a narrative for yourself, brokenly, on social media, only seeing what you want to look at.
When police are shutting down cameras, it is a sign that they know the truth is not going to be kind to them.
No matter how successful you are, no matter how good you are at what you do, even if a golden path rolls out in front of your feet your whole life, there will come one particularly bleak Tuesday when you glance over at Facebook and notice that Jen From Down The Hall has just won an Oscar.
Almost nothing anyone told me about Harvard has been accurate.
In general, sincerity is awkward.
How many stories do you know about people cooped up in places because of deep snowfall? How many stories where something good happens to those people?
Harvard pulsates with life and thought of all kinds, and religion should not be left out of its ongoing discussions.
They will wrest 'dull words' from my cold dead hands.
I tend to process stuff by making jokes about it. It's something that makes me annoying to be around in times of real crisis.
Good laughs melt out of memory pretty quickly.
Bad things happen, and you can only be so prepared.
In society at large, nerds are law-abiding, caring, fundamentally good folk who keep the wheels of civilization grinding.
Once, as my New Year's Resolution, I telephoned the Extenze Male Enhancement hotline every day for a month.
As long as cantankerous old people have existed, they have complained that kids nowadays don't seem to know anything.
At Harvard, people like to impart the idea that you are a mover and shaker.
Harvard is a wondrously tolerant climate for debate and exchange among a wide variety of thoughts, backgrounds, and beliefs, but the voice of religion on campus is largely inaudible.
Dull words are what make many bright sentences shine. They do not call attention to themselves.
MS Paint was my creative outlet for many years.
The biggest way to be productive is if you're procrastinating on another more important project.
Although no one explicitly wants a president who could have a reliable fall back career in stand-up comedy, everyone shudders at the thought of a Rutherford B. Hayes or John Kerry.
All children, except two, grow up: Peter Pan and Donald Trump Jr.
It's easier to find the joke in something when you think, 'This - this is ridiculous.'
President Obama deserves our unalloyed praise for hastening Osama bin Laden's demise.
Forced to confront a reptile or an international financial crisis, I'll take the reptile every time.
I would say 'competence' actually might be slightly more important than passion. I understand that it is important to feel strongly about things, but give me a competent dentist over a passionate dentist any day, if only because something about the phrase 'passionate dentist' is deeply unnerving.
Hi, my name is Alexandra, and I'm a netaholic.
George W. Bush has dutifully, if not intentionally, provided Americans with laughs for nearly a decade. He has also made them cry, sometimes for the same reason.
A picture can hide as much as it reveals.
People talk to pass the time, share information, and entertain each other.
Worst case scenario, nothing I do has any value or purpose, but if I can make someone laugh, I'm at least as useful as a piece of quiche would be.
I swear like a sailor, assuming the sailor in question died in 1800 and was really square.
Some information is important, and some is not, and intelligence consists in knowing one from the other.
While MIT and the University of Chicago duke it out for the title of nerdiest school, James Franco and Renee Zellweger show up at Harvard to party. Somehow, miracle of miracles, Harvard is 'cool.'
You can be brilliant in some ways and despicable in others. You can be a clean, upright, moral individual in your private life who never swears, treats women with respect, and speaks highly of duty and honor - and go out every day and dedicate yourself to a cause that makes the world worse.
Awkward is a state of being.
Pleasure reading has long been an American ideal - generations of schoolchildren have headed home for the summer toting recreational reading lists. But try to pitch it to a group of non-readers, and they quickly become suspicious.
As long as I'm writing stuff and people are reading it, I'll be happy.
Millennials give comics the kind of adulation past generations reserved for musicians. We respect Lady Gaga. But we'll travel hundreds of miles to touch the hem of Jon Stewart's robe.
Harvard prides itself on its diversity - economic, racial, social, geographical - but it remains intellectually segregated. It's not what conservative commentators seem to imagine - a bastion of liberal professors force-feeding radical opinions to a naive student body.
You do not get gold stars for cleaning your toilet. In actual life, there is a depressing lack of stickers.
All the young voters who flocked to Obama in droves grew up watching 'The Daily Show' and the 'Colbert Report.'
A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but I think if the picture is made in MS Paint, the going rate might be slightly less.
George Washington didn't have to make us laugh; he just had to establish precedents and avoid chopping down more cherry trees than he could possibly help. But somewhere along the line, Americans began expecting their presidents to do more than just govern. They also had to make us laugh.
