Alexandra Petri Quotes
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A picture can hide as much as it reveals.
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Once, as my New Year's Resolution, I telephoned the Extenze Male Enhancement hotline every day for a month.
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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.
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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.
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My first summer in college, I interned for Arena Stage in D.C. and taught a disastrous class on standup comedy to middle schoolers at the Arena Stage camp. I had never taught anything before, and needless to say, I quickly lost control of the class.
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The biggest way to be productive is if you're procrastinating on another more important project.
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It's not that Millennials don't believe some things are serious. We'll make 'It Gets Better' videos or perform comedy for disaster relief. But sum up our lives in a phrase? The Importance of Never Being Too Earnest.
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As long as cantankerous old people have existed, they have complained that kids nowadays don't seem to know anything.
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It's easier to find the joke in something when you think, 'This - this is ridiculous.'
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One of the things I try to do - and I always regret when I'm not doing it - is I try to read as much as possible as I'm consuming news.
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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.
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I know from personal experience that it is extremely difficult to read while you work out, especially on a Stairmaster.
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Harvard pulsates with life and thought of all kinds, and religion should not be left out of its ongoing discussions.
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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.
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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.
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Life has its trade-offs. As you age, you lose things like teeth and the ability to play in the ball pit at fast-food restaurants, and you gain things like experience and employer-based health insurance.
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By isolating ourselves from those with whose opinions we disagree, we lose the ability to defend our beliefs.
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Journalists run many risks. It comes with the profession.
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Standup comedy was my weird hobby. I would drag my poor parents out to the only open mics that were in coffee shops instead of bars. I'd get up and go, 'Hi, I'm 17, and I have jokes about matriculation!' At the time I was like, 'Why is no one laughing?'
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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.
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I swear like a sailor, assuming the sailor in question died in 1800 and was really square.
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Snow is like a manic pixie dream girl: fun and whimsical when you encounter it only through the barrier of a movie screen - but absolute misery to have to put up with in real life.
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There is something about a mortarboard that gives otherwise sane and normal people the overwhelming urge to burden you with advice. Some of them cannot help themselves. They were asked to do it by a committee. But one can only take so many pieces of wisdom before they all start to blur together.
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People feel compelled to continue reading and hearing the news. Sometimes, you just want somebody to be yelling at it with you as you're reading it. I think of that as my function.