The difficulty with coming up with a curriculum is mainly that faculty aren't trained to think in terms of general education. They're trained to think in terms of their own discipline, or their specialty.

A person whose financial requirements are modest and whose curiosity, skepticism, and indifference to reputation are outsized is a person at risk of becoming a journalist.

One of the good things about the profession of being a professor, is that you also have time to do what interests you and what you care about or what you're good at.

Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It's quotable because it's been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority.

Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.

Universities are set up to get people to work together by having them disagree with each other.

If you write for the New Yorker, you always get people critiquing your grammar, you can count on it. So, because a lot of New Yorker readers are kind of, you know, amateur grammarians and so you do get a lot of that.