Awkward is a state of being.
In general, sincerity is awkward.
Serious beliefs are awkward, especially religious ones. It's not that there's anything wrong with them, it's just that people's real, heart-felt, deeply held beliefs are, well, 'not easy to handle or deal with, requiring great skill, ingenuity, or care' - in a word, awkward.
As long as cantankerous old people have existed, they have complained that kids nowadays don't seem to know anything.
It turns out that in order to think well, knowledge helps.
Some information is important, and some is not, and intelligence consists in knowing one from the other.
Obama isn't funny.
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.
By isolating ourselves from those with whose opinions we disagree, we lose the ability to defend our beliefs.
Hi, my name is Alexandra, and I'm a netaholic.
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.
At Harvard, where students tend to respond to real-world celebrities with the vague sense that they could do a better job themselves, the recipe for celebrity is complex.
History contains heroes, but no one is a hero entirely, and no one is a hero for very long.
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.
MS Paint was my creative outlet for many years.
All children, except two, grow up: Peter Pan and Donald Trump Jr.
Any promising young white man rich enough to theoretically afford a giant oil painting of himself gets to remain young and innocent forever, and none of his actions have any consequences, whether there is magic involved or not.
Yale students want to impress you with what they're doing. Harvard students want to impress you with how cool they look while doing it.
Everyone praises Harvard 'for the students.' But what makes Harvard's students so great is that they are, in many ways, a cross-section of the larger world. They are normal people who happen to be excellent, and this sets them apart. People who go to Yale go because they want to attend Yale. People who go to Harvard go because they can.
