If the best way to learn to succeed is to fail as fast as possible, then the second-best way is to watch someone else fail as fast as possible. Watching someone else screw up is a kind of rehearsal for your own eventual downfall. A close observation of someone else's attempt to resolve a difficulty is a great way to acquire real-world insight into whether and when to deploy their method in your own times of trouble.

Each generation of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears' wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him.

Any outfit that can't figure out clean toilets and decent theming on its own can't benefit from my advice.

Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

My feelings towards Scott Card are pretty mixed. Politically, he and I are pretty far apart.

The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.