"I had that gleaming countenance you see on people who’ve just come back from the spa. This is why they do it, I thought. No wonder there are more and more metrosexual men. Why wouldn’t you want to look slightly less ghastly? I bless their rage against the dark, saluting them as they pass by into a future of prolonged sexual plausibility, while I remain hobbled by my father’s midcentury notion of manhood, that any male who spent more than five seconds considering his physical appearance might as well be living in Liberace’s guesthouse."

"Calling Twitter and Branch and Quora “media companies” is a new and novel thing, but it’s accurate. These companies *have* learned from traditional media companies. And, I suspect, media companies are going to start learning from them.
Quora is the bridge between Twitter and old media, here. Which part of the company’s rationale for encouraging people to embed posts doesn’t apply to the New York Times? Why, if the posts are going to be quoted anyway, wouldn’t the New Yorker or the Atlantic or CNN or, I don’t know, BuzzFeed, benefit from providing an embed code for its text, which keeps both the publication’s name and logo, the author’s byline, and perhaps even an ad? Traditional media companies might start to ask: Why is Quora doing more to to ensure credit for its unpaid contributors than we are for our expensive content? Why are we being less assertive about ads, which are our lifeblood, than Quora, which is sitting on a cloud of VC money. Copy-pasted text doesn’t make ad money, and simple link doesn’t always capture people. An embed does. “I think you’ll see traditional media companies start to look more like Twitter, and Twitter start to look like traditional media companies,” says [Josh Miller, cofounder of free-floating discussion platform Branch]. And I think he’s right."

"There are very different cultural tastes,” said Jason Baumann, the coordinator of world languages for the New York Public Library, which serves Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island."

"People should understand that simply exercising their rights would shake the foundations of our justice system which works only so long as we accept its terms. As you know, another brutal system of racial and social control once prevailed in this country, and it never would have ended if some people weren’t willing to risk their lives. It would be nice if reasoned argument would do, but as we’ve seen that’s just not the case. So maybe, just maybe, if we truly want to end this system, some of us will have to risk our lives."

"Everybody always feels like they’re twice as smart as the person who’s managing them."

"The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. …Habits aren’t destiny — they can be ignored, changed or replaced. But it’s also true that once the loop is established and a habit emerges, your brain stops fully participating in decision-making. So unless you deliberately fight a habit — unless you find new cues and rewards — the old pattern will unfold automatically."

"to be fair, Brooks’ job as alien columnist for the New York Times changes every week. “Alien, write about immigration!” “Alien, it’s time for a crumbling American society column!” That is a difficult job. It may be made even more difficult if his bosses are aliens themselves, just throwing this other poor green thing wearing a human mask in a barn in suburban Virginia weird, non-sequential assignments on deadline at random."