Wisdom is for statues. Humor uncaps our inhibitions, unleashes our energies, seals friendships, patches hurts. Laughing is probably the most alive you can be.

A lost election can have the jolt of a drop through the gallows door, leading to a dark night of the soul in which the future presses down like a cloud that will never lift.

[Richard Crossley's] previous bird guide, for ID'ing Eastern birds, is the most imaginative, original attempt to re-envision the birding guide and set his approach apart from that of Sibley, Kaufman, Peterson, Nat'l Geo, and the other bibles in the field.

Even the most piddling life is of momentous consequence to its owner.

I remember reading about police arresting this filmmaker making this freaky movie and his name was John Waters. And I was like, wow, someone in Baltimore is doing something creative? I didn't know there were people running off and making eight-millimeter movies. Then I got to New York and realized, oh, there's a whole world of people who do these things. I was utterly bored being in the suburbs, but I didn't know why I was bored.

The Internet and blogging made writing somewhat more solitary and more splintered. It removes the whole sense of the magazine as an organism. A certain dynamism. At The Village Voice, there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers. The New Yorker used to be notorious for everything that went on, sexual intrigues and people had individual offices, they could close the door and take a bottle out of their bottom drawer or have sex on their desk.

Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.