February 2010
January 2010
“I am stricken with the peculiar curse of being a 21st-century woman who makes more than the man she’s living with — first with a husband for 13 years and now with a new partner. It’s an increasingly common situation, according to a recent Pew study that found that the proportion of American marriages in which the wife makes more money rose to 22 percent in 2007 from 4 percent in 1970.”
—My So Called Wife
“Mr. Bowe, a perpetual bachelor, had been in love twice before — in high school and as a graduate student — but it had been so long and this new feeling was so profound that it shook him to the core. Rather than making him happy, he said, it confused him.”
—A Bachelor’s Effort to Understand Love
“It pains me to no end to see my smart, educated, lovely female friends remain single, alone and lonely in spite of their best efforts. These are amazing women! Surely there is something wrong with the world if they remain single for so long. That’s what compelled me to write The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman’s Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible.”
—Why do the smartest women have the toughest time dating?
“Nationality is right up there with religion and professional sports teams as one of the most annoying things that one-dimesional, weak-minded people use as a substitute for an actual personality.”
—Dear Coke Talk
“I’ve met some people who are very dismissive and even hostile of YA, as if it’s nothing more than fluff. They assume that every vampire novel is a Twilight knockoff, or that it would appeal more to their daughters or nephews than to them. Or they postulate that because it’s easier to read, then it must be easier to write than adult fiction. Actually, writing YA is not much different than writing adult novels. The pacing may be faster and the language may be simpler for the intended audience (even though there are many YA books that appeal to adult readers), but the elaborate plot structure is still there to hook the reader in. Writing well for any age group requires skill and talent.”
—Defending YA
“Nowadays of course, being a nerd can mean big money. Everything from Tolkien to comic books to video games is finding its way into mainstream America’s fast food blood stream. Along with it seems to be the rebellious streak that goes along with being the kid who gets picked on for knowing how to write in Tolkien’s Dwarven – a certain righteousness about being the odd person out, the strange smug martyrdom that comes from knowing that painting miniatures and possessing a dice bag marked you as being a freak and an outsider.”
—Bao Phi, “NOCs (Nerds of Color)”
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“Inevitable or not, no one understood all the ramifications of having a super-grandmaster on your laptop, especially what this would mean for professional chess. There were many doomsday scenarios about people losing interest in chess with the rise of the machines, especially after my loss to Deep Blue. Some replied to this with variations on the theme of how we still hold footraces despite cars and bicycles going much faster, a spurious analogy since cars do not help humans run faster while chess computers undoubtedly have an effect on the quality of human chess.”
—Garry Kasparov On ‘Chess Metaphors’: The Chess Master And The Computer
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