The difference between face-to-face conversation and any other medium of communication is simple: No distractions are permitted.
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.
A picture can hide as much as it reveals.
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.
Harvard pulsates with life and thought of all kinds, and religion should not be left out of its ongoing discussions.
Wilde is an invaluable acquaintance. Often, in situations where I am required to appear witty, I simply steal large chunks from his works and attempt to pass them off as my own with minor modifications.
Books are wonderful. They are like people, except they mind less when you put them down and wander off to eat something.
The problem with technology, as with fashion, is that it's impossible to be 'in' forever.
Life has its trade-offs. As you age, you lose things like teeth and the ability to play in the ball pit at fast-food restaurants, and you gain things like experience and employer-based health insurance.
Snow is like a manic pixie dream girl: fun and whimsical when you encounter it only through the barrier of a movie screen - but absolute misery to have to put up with in real life.
Once, as my New Year's Resolution, I telephoned the Extenze Male Enhancement hotline every day for a month.
I love Gene Weingarten's feature writing with the passion of a thousand suns.
You do not get gold stars for cleaning your toilet. In actual life, there is a depressing lack of stickers.
People feel compelled to continue reading and hearing the news. Sometimes, you just want somebody to be yelling at it with you as you're reading it. I think of that as my function.
History contains heroes, but no one is a hero entirely, and no one is a hero for very long.
Almost nothing anyone told me about Harvard has been accurate.
If you're doing what you do because you love it, you have room to be happy for others. And that's a lot of fun, when you get down to it.
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.
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.
At Harvard, people like to impart the idea that you are a mover and shaker.
Forced to confront a reptile or an international financial crisis, I'll take the reptile every time.
The desire for attention has become a primal need along the lines of food, water, and clothing.
Hi, my name is Alexandra, and I'm a netaholic.
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.
Harvard is nerd rehab. You have to check yourself in. Those who seek a school filled with self-proclaimed 'nerds,' seek elsewhere. Dropping the H bomb may brand you as an intellectual or a Kennedy. But it will not give you much nerd cred. And that's a good thing.
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.
I swear like a sailor, assuming the sailor in question died in 1800 and was really square.
All the weird inconveniences of adult life that you thought they made up to lend excitement and color to episodes of 'Sex and the City' are, in fact, real.
I am a millennial. Destruction is all I know. I no longer care what I wipe from the face of the Earth.
President Obama deserves our unalloyed praise for hastening Osama bin Laden's demise.
Bills ought to be passed with deliberation by committees. Change should be achieved in a bipartisan manner. Incrementally, day by day, we should reach a consensus - not perfect, by any means - but something that we can be proud of, nonetheless.
If awkward has an antithesis, it is probably Barack Obama.
All the young voters who flocked to Obama in droves grew up watching 'The Daily Show' and the 'Colbert Report.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
All children, except two, grow up: Peter Pan and Donald Trump Jr.
Standup comedy was my weird hobby. I would drag my poor parents out to the only open mics that were in coffee shops instead of bars. I'd get up and go, 'Hi, I'm 17, and I have jokes about matriculation!' At the time I was like, 'Why is no one laughing?'
My first summer in college, I interned for Arena Stage in D.C. and taught a disastrous class on standup comedy to middle schoolers at the Arena Stage camp. I had never taught anything before, and needless to say, I quickly lost control of the class.
I majored in extracurriculars, honestly. I joined the Harvard Stand Up Comedy Society, which is a ragtag band of misfits. I wrote for 'On Harvard Time,' which was a student TV show trying to be 'The Daily Show.' And I wrote a humor column for 'The Crimson' starting my sophomore year.
My goal is to be weirder than everybody else and hope that no one stops me. So far, no one has.
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.
Millennials don't go to rallies.
It's not that Millennials don't believe some things are serious. We'll make 'It Gets Better' videos or perform comedy for disaster relief. But sum up our lives in a phrase? The Importance of Never Being Too Earnest.
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.
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?
Anything you loved, however intensely, becomes mortifying the moment you cease to love it.
