Quotes

“She really does not take criticism personally,” said her daughter, Christine Pelosi. “She always, always said when we were kids: ‘You have to understand that criticism and effectiveness go hand in hand. You have to wake up and let today be a new day.’ ”

Like Sin City on Ecstasy, the movie bounces live humans around a series of rainbow-bright green-screen play spaces, each more gorgeously artificial than the last. The racing sequences evoke the world under the glass of a pinball machine, as experienced by the ball; the flashbacks to Speed’s childhood are straight out of Mickey’s Toontown, a molded-plastic suburb that’s the most Uncanny Valleyish part of Disneyland; the desert is made of Dorito dust.

And the pianist is, like, “Fuck you!” And he’s really drunk, because he’s only one foot tall and so his tolerance for alcohol is extremely low. And he’s, like, “Fuck you, asshole! Fuck you!”

I can think of few things more damaging to the self-esteem of the 40-something parent still trying to hang onto thin tendrils of cultural currency than to look at something your 2-year-old is watching and be utterly baffled. Of course, I first discovered the world of DisneyCollector through my daughter, who was born in 2011. Her obsession with these videos suggested to me some kind of deep neurological massaging, as if my child’s developing brain had a keyhole opening that lay in wait only for a faceless woman with a South American accent and brightly manicured nails removing letter-shaped Play-Doh molds from their packaging.

Maybe twenty years ago I read a ’zine interview with a prostitute in which she put down her rules for her johns. Most of the rules were common sense about condoms, showing up on time, and so forth, but the one rule that stuck with me was, “don’t take a shit in my toilet!”

Email is actually a tremendous, decentralized, open platform on which new, innovative things can and have been built. In that way, email represents a different model from the closed ecosystems we see proliferating across our computers and devices.

AVC: Has the experience changed how you grocery shop today? MF: No, it has not.

If Aaron Swartz has become hacktivism’s patron saint, weev remains its problem child.

Is it possible that man was not meant to ingest infinite quantities of mozzarella sticks?

A standard question on any early dinner date should be quite simply: ‘And how are you mad?’

If you took out the sex, it would be kind of boring. And if you took out the idealistic component—our commitment to the sweatshop-free, made-in-USA philosophy—it would just be sleazy. But you put them together, and you have something that’s interesting. It’s edgy, but it’s also strangely wholesome at the same time.

During the campaign, Thompson shaved his head in order to be able to refer to the incumbent Republican Carrol D. Whitmire, who had a crew cut, as “my long-haired opponent.”

The source for the resistant genes was also a bacterium, a strain discovered living in the mud by one of the company’s own herbicide factories. Constantly exposed to glyphosate runoff, the organism had developed immunity.

"I'm a better runner than most other entrants, but the drinking is really where the world records are won and lost," says Mr. Symmonds, 30, who posted a 5:19 beer mile shortly after his appearance at the 2012 Olympics.

Have you ever noticed the peculiar tendency you have to let praise pass through you, but to feel crushed by criticism? A thousand positive remarks can slip by unnoticed, but one “you suck” can linger in your head for days. One hypothesis as to why this and the backfire effect happen is that you spend much more time considering information you disagree with than you do information you accept. Information that lines up with what you already believe passes through the mind like a vapor, but when you come across something that threatens your beliefs, something that conflicts with your preconceived notions of how the world works, you seize up and take notice. Some psychologists speculate there is an evolutionary explanation. Your ancestors paid more attention and spent more time thinking about negative stimuli than positive because bad things required a response. Those who failed to address negative stimuli failed to keep breathing.

The MiG came back. Fred had the same shit-eating grin as Paul. It must be something in the oxygen supply. Fred got out and I got in. We took off. Full afterburners. It was like someone kicking me in the kidneys. We left the ground and did a power slide around the airport for the video cameras. That took about 20 seconds and we were going about 500 kmph. Then it was nose up 75 degrees and a full afterburner climb at 1000 kmph to 11000 meters. It took about 40 seconds. On the way up, all of the G-forces subsided and you could just see the earth pull away. It was sunset with a beautiful red sun. Amazing! The MiG took off, had made a pass of the airport and reached vapor trail heights before my Cessna would have reached the departure end of the runway.