When wine drinkers tell me they taste notes of cherries, tobacco and rose petals, usually all I can detect is a whole lot of jackass.
The truth is that people who pull triggers are ultimately responsible, whether they're following orders or not. An army of people making individual moral choices may be inefficient, but an army of people ignoring their morality is horrifying.
When Time got rid of my column, I thought it was all over. It was really sad. And then, I just started pushing it to lots of places. And I thought someone would run my column, I thought it was popular, and no one wanted it.
I think the local food movement has been taken to idiotic extremes. And so I wrote about that and people got pissed.
Heaven is totally overrated. It seems boring. Clouds, listening to people play the harp. It should be somewhere you can't wait to go, like a luxury hotel. Maybe blue skies and soft music were enough to keep people in line in the 17th century, but heaven has to step it up a bit. They're basically getting by because they only have to be better than hell.
I always thought that being at Time and tweaking your bosses and exploiting your expense account was just fun. Just joyous.
Online reaction is very different than real-world reaction.
I'm not that clued into what people are that touchy about and how many of them there are and how niche these niches are.
I have a really high bar for being angry. Like, it doesn't even happen every year.
People are different in different situations and people are different online than they are in real life.
I've gotten thicker skin mostly from being older. You just stop caring quite as much about everything.
People would ask if I wanted to host things and I was like, "No, I'm a writer, I don't host things." Just thinking I wouldn't be good at it - which is true - but also just wanting to hold on to some part of my identity.
If New Vegas foretells something about America's future, then the culture wars are all but over, and culture lost.
I love sushi, but I'm not going to write a column about it.
Being in New York and having worked at Time Out New York and then being at Time, living in New York for a long time has helped because I know everybody. And they're the people who call me and give me jobs. So that kind of real networking, which is just living in a place and having jobs where people around you are extremely successful, has helped me tremendously.
I'm good at marketing myself through the columns. But compared to other people I know, as far as networking and pushing yourself out there, I'm not very good at that.
I have some idea that if I pick on [boy band] One Direction, I'll get a ton of hate mail, because I know that when you're 15, you love a band like you will kill people. But I don't quite realize that that's true about people - adults - who read The Hunger Games.
I don't read the "letters" section of Time magazine. I think it's just my habit as a reader. I don't read comments on stories, in general.
I don't read "letters" sections of magazines, but I'll read anyone's blog post about me.
I can't explain why I don't read comments. Maybe because I worked at Time for so long and they don't have them, so I keep forgetting that they're there.
I never thought to look at the New York Times one, even though I knew people were pissed off. I've seen YouTube videos from people who are pissed off at me about that and that takes a lot of effort to go find.
I've definitely written people e-mails telling them I've loved their stories, but that seems more like a professional journalist thing to do.
I can't imagine what someone would write that would infuriate me. Maybe if my loved one had died of some disease and someone was insensitive, that would piss me off.
You don't get anywhere without saying yes.
Early on, even in college, I figured out that it was just more interesting to me to create content than to write about other people. So that makes it more marketable.
