Journalist

No generation has escaped it - one morning, your skill with the eight-track or the record player or the cotton gin suddenly ceases to impress. It's just one of those inevitable disappointments that come with growing up, like the realization that Santa doesn't exist or the way that music always takes a turn for the worse after you turn 30.

Pleasure reading has long been an American ideal - generations of schoolchildren have headed home for the summer toting recreational reading lists. But try to pitch it to a group of non-readers, and they quickly become suspicious.

Journalists run many risks. It comes with the profession.

The biggest way to be productive is if you're procrastinating on another more important project.

All that time that we spend tweeting our thoughts and emotions to our next of kin, we could be writing the great American novel, starting a business, or just living.

I love Gene Weingarten's feature writing with the passion of a thousand suns.

I can be serious for an hour; then I have to go lie down.

They will wrest 'dull words' from my cold dead hands.

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.

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

Almost nothing anyone told me about Harvard has been accurate.

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

All children, except two, grow up: Peter Pan and Donald Trump Jr.

Once you start worrying, it's hard to stop.

It turns out that in order to think well, knowledge helps.

Dull words are what make many bright sentences shine. They do not call attention to themselves.

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.

People talk to pass the time, share information, and entertain each other.

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.

As long as I'm writing stuff and people are reading it, I'll be happy.