It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes called "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.

Most of us will still take nihilism over neanderthalism.

Ideally, each piece of art's its own unique object, and its evaluation's always present-tense.

It's in the democratic citizen's nature to be like a leaf that doesn't believe in the tree it's part of.

It's weird to feel like you miss someone you're not even sure you know.

At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum's axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.