At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice.

...I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as "the sport of the future" since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come.

In the Far East, it's very normal for people to wear masks in flu season. I don't know if I'd ever do that, though, because I don't like having things on my face.

It's peculiar what you remember when you're not trying.

Her nomination for vice president in 2008 represents the most desperate inclinations of the Republican Party. In two hundred years, I suspect historians will use Palin as an example of how insane America became in the decade following the destruction of the World Trade Center, and her origin story will seem as extraterrestrial and eccentric as Abe Lincoln jumping out of a window to undermine a voting quorum in 1840.

Every one of Joel's important songs--including the happy ones--are ultimately about loneliness. And it's not 'clever lonely' (like Morrissey) or 'interesting lonely' (like Radiohead); it's 'lonely lonely,' like the way it feels when you're being hugged by someone and it somehow makes you sadder.

If I knew I was going to die at a specific moment in the future, it would be nice to be able to control what song I was listening to; this is why I always bring my iPod on airplanes.