Everyone praises Harvard 'for the students.' But what makes Harvard's students so great is that they are, in many ways, a cross-section of the larger world. They are normal people who happen to be excellent, and this sets them apart. People who go to Yale go because they want to attend Yale. People who go to Harvard go because they can.
— Alexandra Petri
All children, except two, grow up: Peter Pan and Donald Trump Jr.
MS Paint was my creative outlet for many years.
There should be no real difficulty in condemning Nazis, white supremacists, and the Ku Klux Klan. They are, for God's sake, Nazis and white supremacists. This should not require moral courage. This is obvious. This is the moral equivalent of the text you type to prove you're not a robot.
Hi, my name is Alexandra, and I'm a netaholic.
Obama isn't funny.
Some information is important, and some is not, and intelligence consists in knowing one from the other.
As long as cantankerous old people have existed, they have complained that kids nowadays don't seem to know anything.
In general, sincerity is awkward.
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.
They will wrest 'dull words' from my cold dead hands.
As long as I'm writing stuff and people are reading it, I'll be happy.
I can be serious for an hour; then I have to go lie down.
Harvard is a wondrously tolerant climate for debate and exchange among a wide variety of thoughts, backgrounds, and beliefs, but the voice of religion on campus is largely inaudible.
In society at large, nerds are law-abiding, caring, fundamentally good folk who keep the wheels of civilization grinding.
The difference between face-to-face conversation and any other medium of communication is simple: No distractions are permitted.
YouTube is covered in comments that would be better expressed - and better spelled - via a simple thumbs-up or down.
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.
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.
You can be brilliant in some ways and despicable in others. You can be a clean, upright, moral individual in your private life who never swears, treats women with respect, and speaks highly of duty and honor - and go out every day and dedicate yourself to a cause that makes the world worse.
I am a millennial. Destruction is all I know. I no longer care what I wipe from the face of the Earth.
By isolating ourselves from those with whose opinions we disagree, we lose the ability to defend our beliefs.
All the young voters who flocked to Obama in droves grew up watching 'The Daily Show' and the 'Colbert Report.'
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.
If awkward has an antithesis, it is probably Barack Obama.
Awkward is a state of being.
Comedy and politics have a lot in common. Both are great ways to pick up chicks - just look at Governor Spitzer. Or Ellen Degeneres. Both require spending time on the road meeting strangers who often have the desire to throw things at you. Both are difficult, if not impossible, to do all alone. And both rely heavily on personality.
Dull words are what make many bright sentences shine. They do not call attention to themselves.
I think, when you're doing a column and blogging every day, you get familiar with the sound of your own voice.
Harvard pulsates with life and thought of all kinds, and religion should not be left out of its ongoing discussions.
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.
While MIT and the University of Chicago duke it out for the title of nerdiest school, James Franco and Renee Zellweger show up at Harvard to party. Somehow, miracle of miracles, Harvard is 'cool.'
People talk to pass the time, share information, and entertain each other.
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.
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.
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.
History contains heroes, but no one is a hero entirely, and no one is a hero for very long.
At Harvard, where students tend to respond to real-world celebrities with the vague sense that they could do a better job themselves, the recipe for celebrity is complex.
Harvard prides itself on its diversity - economic, racial, social, geographical - but it remains intellectually segregated. It's not what conservative commentators seem to imagine - a bastion of liberal professors force-feeding radical opinions to a naive student body.
George Washington didn't have to make us laugh; he just had to establish precedents and avoid chopping down more cherry trees than he could possibly help. But somewhere along the line, Americans began expecting their presidents to do more than just govern. They also had to make us laugh.
It turns out that in order to think well, knowledge helps.
Serious beliefs are awkward, especially religious ones. It's not that there's anything wrong with them, it's just that people's real, heart-felt, deeply held beliefs are, well, 'not easy to handle or deal with, requiring great skill, ingenuity, or care' - in a word, awkward.
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.
It's easier to find the joke in something when you think, 'This - this is ridiculous.'
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.
Nearly everything faith-related that I have done at Harvard has been followed by free food, from going to services at Harvard's Episcopal Chaplaincy to attending a day of interfaith discussion and dialogue hosted by the university chaplains in the fall.
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.
Stereotyped as convention-going, pocket-protector-wearing, chess-playing, infrequently-showering types, nerds are one of our society's most ridiculed groups. And, for a university with an international reputation as a bastion of intellectualism, Harvard is startlingly devoid of them.
No one has debates on Twitter.
