But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic r...
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If cavemen had known how to laugh, history would have been different.
We must start from the premise that—in all likelihood—we are already wrong. And not wrong in the sense that we are examining questions and coming to incorrect conclusions, because most of our conclusi...
If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word coincidence exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists.
Everything said about Gen Xers--both positive and negative--was completely true. Twenty-somethings in the nineties rejected the traditional working-class American lifestyle because (a) they were smart...
Contrary to what you may have heard from Henry Rollins or/and Ian MacKaye and/or anyone else who joined a band after working in an ice cream shop, you can't really learn much about a person based on w...
According to the director, Primer is a movie about the relationship between risk and trust. This is true. But it also makes a concrete point about the potential purpose of time travel—it’s too importa...
Everything I understood seven hours ago has already changed, and that I have to learn everything again.
Well, that’s how it always seems, until it doesn’t.
We all eventually become whatever we pretend to hate.
Twelve Monkeys makes a lot of references to the Cassandra complex (named for a Greek myth about a young woman’s inability to convince others that her prophetic warnings are accurate), but it’s mostly...
There’s one kind of writing that’s always easy: Picking out something obviously stupid and reiterating how stupid it obviously is. This is the lowest form of criticism, easily accomplished by anyone....
The year you spent ‘killing yourself’to make me love you…I thought that was us being best friends. We had all those intimate conversations and you sent me all those long e-mails and we watched all tho...
The only modern narrative that handles the conundrum semi-successfully is Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, where schizophrenic heartthrob Jake Gyllenhaal uses a portal to move back in time twelve days, t...
The middle class does not exist. If you believe you are part of the middle class it just means you're rich and insecure or poor and misinformed.
Q: Assume everything about your musical tastes was reversed overnight. Everything you once loved, you now hate; everything you once hated, you now love. For example, if your favorite band has always b...
Pundits are always blaming TV for making people stupid, movies for desensitizing the world to violence, and rock music for making kids take drugs and kill themselves. These things should be the least...
Part of the reason forward-thinking media networks like Twitter succeed is because people3 want to believe that every immaterial thing they do is pertinent by default; it’s interesting because it happ...
Once people decide they want you to do something, they don’t really care what your qualifications are. However you describe yourself becomes proof that you’re the ideal candidate. This is true in jour...
Literary posterity may