The premise and promise of Big Data is that there are no stories, only patterns; that the human preference for story is aligned with the human tendency for error; and that only through dislocations in scale - the scale of sample size and of time - will truth emerge.

Tom Junod

You don't have to love cooking to cook, but you have to do more than love baking to bake. You have to bake out of love.

Tom Junod

Gluttony is harder than it looks. It's listed as a sin, as something you give in to, when really it's a skill, requiring not just hunger but resilience. That's why the most resilient city in the country, New Orleans, is also the most gluttonous.

Tom Junod

A mob pelting pilloried wrongdoers with rotten vegetables would seem to have little in common with one doing the same with 140-character invective, except of course the most important thing: the belief that they are in the right, and are even doing good by making the object of their contempt feel really, really bad.

Tom Junod

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man took off his jacket and put on a sweater. Then he took off his shoes and put on a pair of sneakers. His name was Fred Rogers.

Tom Junod

The main difference between listening to music on a computer and listening to music on vinyl or disc is not sound quality or even portability; it's that when you listen to music on a computer, you listen to music on the same instrument you use to acquire it.

Tom Junod

I have a mean streak and I am capable of cruelty. This does not mean that I am necessarily mean and cruel; instead, it means that I have to be vigilant about my capacity for cruelty and the mean bone in my body.

Tom Junod

Wearing a suit can seem like a somewhat archaic gesture, a concession to formality in a determinedly casual age.

Tom Junod

Josh Ozersky was a meat man. He knew meat, revered it, studied it, sang it, evangelized it, wrote about it, and, of course, ate it. Lots of it. Life, for Josh, was meat, and writing. Everything else was a side.

Tom Junod

My mother was not a country girl. She was a Brooklyn girl, born and raised in Flatbush, and then a Long Island girl, who liked shopping, 'a little glitter' in her clothes, and keeping secret the actual color of her hair, which from the day I was born to the day she died, was the 'platinum blonde' of Jean Harlow's.

Tom Junod

Any child can tell you what Google does - Google gives you the answers. But Google doesn't, not really.

Tom Junod

The premise and promise of Big Data is that there are no stories, only patterns; that the human preference for story is aligned with the human tendency for error; and that only through dislocations in scale - the scale of sample size and of time - will truth emerge.

Tom Junod

Conservatives still attack feminism with the absurd notion that it makes its adherents less attractive to men; in truth, it is feminism that has made forty-two-year-old women so desirable.

Tom Junod

Once upon a time, a man named Fred Rogers decided that he wanted to live in heaven.

Tom Junod

Now, I'm fully aware that there is only one figure more pitiable, more ludicrous, more inherently ridiculous than a bad singer who keeps on singing, and that's a bad singer who keeps on singing because he has issues.

Tom Junod

Fred Rogers was a children's-TV host, but he was not Captain Kangaroo or Officer Joe Bolton. He was an ordained Presbyterian minister who was so appalled by what he saw on 1950s television--adults trying to entertain children by throwing pies in each other's faces - that he joined the medium as a reformer.

Tom Junod

The fact is, you can't have Southern friends without eventually wanting to sing with them, and without eventually learning that the only way to sing with them is to make your peace with country music.

Tom Junod

I was not a fan. Moreover, I reveled in not being a fan, as though not being able to tolerate Robin Williams was one of the things by which I defined myself.

Tom Junod

The great character actors are now the actors whose work has the element of ritual sacrifice once claimed by the DeNiros of the world, as well as the element of danger - the actors who thrill us by going for broke.

Tom Junod

It sounds lonely being Bob Dylan, because Bob Dylan likes being around other Bob Dylans, and there are not many other Bob Dylans around.

Tom Junod

That's the first thing you learn when you busk in the New York City subways: you immediately join the ranks of the marginalized, the unhinged prophets, the Christian shouters, the Hare Krishnas, the Jehovah's witnesses, the father-and-daughter kitaro team, the violinists playing for their sickly wives.

Tom Junod