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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.
Alexandra Petri
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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.
Alexandra Petri
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It's easier to find the joke in something when you think, 'This - this is ridiculous.'
Alexandra Petri
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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.
Alexandra Petri
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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.
Alexandra Petri
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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.
Alexandra Petri
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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.
Alexandra Petri
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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.
Alexandra Petri
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Worst case scenario, nothing I do has any value or purpose, but if I can make someone laugh, I'm at least as useful as a piece of quiche would be.
Alexandra Petri
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MS Paint was my creative outlet for many years.
Alexandra Petri
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If you're doing what you do because you love it, you have room to be happy for others. And that's a lot of fun, when you get down to it.
Alexandra Petri
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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.
Alexandra Petri
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If you want to be famous because you do something well or badly, be it singing while fat or hitting balls of various shapes and hues, you have to be prepared to divulge. We live in the age of the chronic overshare.
Alexandra Petri
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The desire for attention has become a primal need along the lines of food, water, and clothing.
Alexandra Petri
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Some information is important, and some is not, and intelligence consists in knowing one from the other.
Alexandra Petri
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Forced to confront a reptile or an international financial crisis, I'll take the reptile every time.
Alexandra Petri
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I can be serious for an hour; then I have to go lie down.
Alexandra Petri
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All the weird inconveniences of adult life that you thought they made up to lend excitement and color to episodes of 'Sex and the City' are, in fact, real.
Alexandra Petri
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Ferguson shows the power of social media. This could have not been a story. Or it could have just been a local story. Or it could have been something that we saw only from a distance, through the usual filters. Instead, it gathered steam.
Alexandra Petri
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The difference between face-to-face conversation and any other medium of communication is simple: No distractions are permitted.
Alexandra Petri
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At college, everyone's milestones occurred in shared clumps. Everyone studied, caroused, won, lost - simultaneously. Life is not like that.
Alexandra Petri
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President Obama deserves our unalloyed praise for hastening Osama bin Laden's demise.
Alexandra Petri
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It is possible to assemble a narrative for yourself, brokenly, on social media, only seeing what you want to look at.
Alexandra Petri
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People talk to pass the time, share information, and entertain each other.
Alexandra Petri
