If gaming were seen as an art, the important question would be not whether games are good for us but whether they are good, full stop.
— Naomi Alderman
One of the hardest challenges posed by the modern world is how to deal with abundance. It's even harder to confront because admitting that it's a problem seems spoiled.
If you hold strong convictions against gay marriage, you shouldn't apply for a job as a registrar.
Feminists are asking the practical questions about how you want to live your life.
I like things that take you by the hand and say, 'You think you know about this - you think you understand it - but there's so much that you don't.'
Sometimes you feel like the people who invest in hate are winning. Then you just want to talk about love and what it really means to love yourself.
The thing about having true fans, it seems, is that they remain loyal to their idea of what the work meant to them. And that might make them more exacting than the toughest studio executive or publishing boss.
For millennia, human beings have been finding new ways to look at the world through each others' eyes: from projecting ourselves onto the characters in novels or movies to dressing up in costume to devouring the details of some celebrity's life in 'Hello' or 'OK.'
I've been a comics fan since my first hit of those gateway drawings: Judy, Asterix, and the TV cartoon 'Spider-Man and his Amazing Friend' - which naturally led me to Spider-Man comics.
I wish that positions of power dependent on education were as open to abused children, poor children, working-class children as they are to the children of the rich and successful. I really wish that were true.
We all know that the desire for perfection can get in the way of authenticity and enjoyment; it's the same with games. There's a completist part to many of us that can't rest until we reach the perfect 100% finish point.
Writing is investigation.
Let's teach boys at school the personally and economically valuable skills of self-expression and emotional intelligence, of mediation and problem-solving.
Utopias and dystopias can exist side by side, even in the same moment. Which one you're in depends entirely on your point of view.
What makes 'The Handmaid's Tale' so terrifying is that everything that happens in it is plausible.
I honestly can't think of many more truly romantic gestures than a really well-thought-through prenuptial agreement.
Computer games can be works of art and literature - they're still developing. The stories they can tell, and the experiences they provide, are increasingly sophisticated and glorious.
The arts are valuable because they increase our sense of what it means to be human, not because of any specific skill or ability they confer.
Games don't cause racism. But the real-time chat makes nasty comments hard to moderate and easy to spread.
Too many keep-fit ideas are designed for those who are already fit, and they're just no fun.
It's absolutely delightful to get dressed up for a lovely evening, but when it goes from being a fun thing to being a chore, and a chore that men don't have to do, then we need to think about it differently.
I have no wish to offend, but I do think that holy cows need challenging.
I love books. I want to read them, and I want to own them so they're always available to be reread.
As someone who went to school in the '70s and '80s, I can't say that I noticed much of a 'medals for all' culture myself.
The hilarity or brilliance of a forwarded link is inversely proportional to the number of people it's sent to.
More choice doesn't make us happy, and we understand that no one has infinite choices about how to live life.
I wish it were true that every child had access to an education that helped them reach their full potential.
Traditions are always puzzling to those who don't share them. I'm Jewish, so the idea of a 'perfect family Christmas' is foreign to me.
Expect to be disgusted by your own early work. If writing is your vocation, if you hope that it might be your salvation, push on through the disgust until you find one true sentence, a few words that say more than you expected, something you didn't know until you set it down.
We urgently need to address the assumption bound up in our employment laws and custody arrangements that women are the 'natural child carers' and men don't really want much to do with their children.
Writers of feminist dystopian fiction are alert to the realities that grind down women's lives, that make the unthinkable suddenly thinkable.
We human beings get nervous if we don't know what's going on. It's the rule for creating scary stories: the unknown is always more frightening than the known.
Twitter's strength - and its weakness - is that it makes it extremely easy to share every passing thought with everyone on your friends list.
The gaming world isn't filled only with violence and depravity. In fact, it's mostly enchanting.
If something is a problem, it's all right to admit it.
Gaming is our cultural bogeyman - we blame it for everything from child obesity to violence to short attention spans. But any explanation that fits every situation ultimately explains nothing.
My childhood was full of shocks and alarums, and I had to work a long time to make a life that pleases me.
The women's movement gave me a set of tools to think about things like my body and how people react to me and the way that my dating life was going. It's a very practical movement - yes, it's about issues like how we can get more women MPs elected, but it's also about how feminism affects things like your relationship.
No one should ever feel obliged to speak or to put themselves out publicly online, but I do think it's a good thing to do. The more of us who are women, making our work and just going 'Here I am, here's my work,' the easier it gets for everybody. It's a good thing to do.
I am someone who really would like to see more women in government, but Palin makes me cringe every time I hear about her.
Competitive sports may be where exercise becomes 'fun' for children who are good at it, but for those who are less talented, it is where exercise becomes not only physically demanding but also emotionally painful and socially humiliating.
I hate to be one of those people who forwards links to 'hilarious pictures' or 'brilliant games' to half their contacts database.
Personal trainers, however nice, give me PE teacher flashbacks.
Our culture tends to denigrate things that are associated with women. It's OK for women to wear trousers, for example, but not OK for men to wear skirts.
I've only got anywhere with Minecraft by getting my friends to explain it.
You learn the most from sitting down and doing the work, regularly, patiently, sometimes in hope, sometimes despairingly.
What I want is a world where neither gender nor sex are destiny. Where no child is ever told there's anything they can't do, or must do, 'because you're a boy' or 'because you're a girl.' It's not a world where anything is 'taken' from anyone - it's one where everyone's possibilities are enlarged.
The politics of fear are always the same. They are easily recognisable in retrospect. They are easy to acquiesce in at the time.
When a marriage founders, this may well be cause for tremendous sadness, but it's not a failure of spirit or character. People change, their goals and dreams alter, their ideas of themselves grow, or they just meet someone they like better.
While 'Iron Man' is tremendous fun, it's another reminder of the pressure on all of us to make ourselves increasingly perfect and a little less human. And that is something it is important to resist.
