Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

The difference between face-to-face conversation and any other medium of communication is simple: No distractions are permitted.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

A picture can hide as much as it reveals.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

Forced to confront a reptile or an international financial crisis, I'll take the reptile every time.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

If awkward has an antithesis, it is probably Barack Obama.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

I am a millennial. Destruction is all I know. I no longer care what I wipe from the face of the Earth.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

All the young voters who flocked to Obama in droves grew up watching 'The Daily Show' and the 'Colbert Report.'

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

President Obama deserves our unalloyed praise for hastening Osama bin Laden's demise.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

I swear like a sailor, assuming the sailor in question died in 1800 and was really square.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

Harvard pulsates with life and thought of all kinds, and religion should not be left out of its ongoing discussions.

Alexandra Petri
Alexandra Petri

Once, as my New Year's Resolution, I telephoned the Extenze Male Enhancement hotline every day for a month.