Alexandra Petri Quotes
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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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It turns out that in order to think well, knowledge helps.
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Good laughs melt out of memory pretty quickly.
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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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I know from personal experience that it is extremely difficult to read while you work out, especially on a Stairmaster.
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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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Harvard pulsates with life and thought of all kinds, and religion should not be left out of its ongoing discussions.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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It's easier to find the joke in something when you think, 'This - this is ridiculous.'
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Journalists run many risks. It comes with the profession.
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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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By isolating ourselves from those with whose opinions we disagree, we lose the ability to defend our beliefs.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I majored in extracurriculars, honestly. I joined the Harvard Stand Up Comedy Society, which is a ragtag band of misfits. I wrote for 'On Harvard Time,' which was a student TV show trying to be 'The Daily Show.' And I wrote a humor column for 'The Crimson' starting my sophomore year.