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.
The difference between face-to-face conversation and any other medium of communication is simple: No distractions are permitted.
Woodstock didn't define a generation because everyone showed up or those who did were a perfectly representative sample. It defined a generation because, for a few days, it bottled its peculiar zeitgeist.
Forced to confront a reptile or an international financial crisis, I'll take the reptile every time.
There should be no real difficulty in condemning Nazis, white supremacists, and the Ku Klux Klan. They are, for God's sake, Nazis and white supremacists. This should not require moral courage. This is obvious. This is the moral equivalent of the text you type to prove you're not a robot.
Thanks to postmodernism, we tend to see all facts as meaningless trivia, no one more vital than any other. Yet this disregard for facts qua facts is intellectually crippling. Facts are the raw material of thought, and the knowledge of significant facts makes sophisticated thought possible.
If awkward has an antithesis, it is probably Barack Obama.
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.
Being a person of faith is just another of a wide range of fun activities available to those who come to Harvard. When Harvard boasts to admitted students of its more than 40 religious groups, it does so in the same vein that it boasts of its nearly dozen a cappella groups.
Success is like food caught in your teeth: much more noticeable when it happens to other people. If it happens to you, other people have to take you aside and say something.
President Obama deserves our unalloyed praise for hastening Osama bin Laden's demise.
Once, as my New Year's Resolution, I telephoned the Extenze Male Enhancement hotline every day for a month.