"Dr. Glatter said that he recently treated a fashion publicist whose hands were cracked and red from slathering Purell every 10 minutes, like Lady Macbeth with a BlackBerry." nytimes.com

"One night we have dinner with Claire, a goyish woman Simon mates with in defiance of our Lord."

newyorker.com

"The family's principal entertainment, the Russian journalist Vasily Peskov noted, 'was for everyone to recount their dreams.'"

smithsonianmag.com

Thirty years ago someone found culpable of the kinds of gross fraud and deceit I perpetrated would have thrown themselves out a window or gassed themselves in a garage, and while people would have shook their heads and muttered a few things about how awful suicide is, deep down they would have thought, "Well, good for him; at least in the end he did the only right and honorable thing he could have done."
theawl.com

People as productive as Gates should not be required to shake hands, and the same can be said for people less productive than Gates.

"Tweet like ur kids are reading."

branch.com

"The most complicated machine ever built got knocked out of the sky by a pound and a half of foam."

"Only the rare reader would finish this piece of digito-futuristic nonsense unconvinced that technology is—to borrow a term of art from the philosopher Harry Frankfurt—bullshit."

"It was as if human society, having been torn apart, was starting to remake itself already—as if with time there could have been kings and queens on that drifting hull, and maybe even priests. But then the ocean washed them all away."

"In one of the final, wheezing gasps from the magazine that the world, for 79 years, used to know as Newsweek, there is now word that The Newsweek Daily Beast Company has officially changed its name to 'NewsBeast'—which sounds about as fierce as the company is not."

"Even the German soldiers, when they captured American airmen, would take the A-2s and wear them, because the Nazi army never issued anything so cool."

"Each one-syllable word becomes a heavy, blunt chunk of butter that is melted and baked into the pound cake of the line." -Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

"Whenever the little green tree frog sings from his tree, the thunderclaps gather and it rains upon the world." —Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire: Genesis

Neither confounding the Substances; nor dividing the Essence, for there is one Person of Molly, another of Meth, and another of Ecstasy, which is MDMA. -- Mallory Ortberg

"What they didn't know was Sean Raftis, who was "It," had flown in from Seattle and was folded in the trunk of the Honda Accord."

"Like all larger-than-life characters, Tim Geithner is smaller in person." —Jessica Pressler, "43 Minutes With Time Geithner" nymag.com

"It is quite extraordinary to have the Honored Guest Experience in such conditions: they're proudly showing you their latest technology or best library, & you can see your breath."

"His father, an old-time socialist, used to say that art is an investment and people don't like to invest in strangers." -- Jacob Lampart, "Still Life with Scar," The Muse of Ocean Parkway

"BABY Got Back" is an exuberant hip-hop paean to female callipygian bounty.

econ.st

"Some days, it feels like a million tiny feet grinding deep into my esophagus—everything seizes up, and I find it difficult to breathe." therumpus.net

"Memorized poems are a sort of larder, laid up against the hungers of an extended period of solitude."

"There's a way that network television normalizes and sanitizes the dirt of being alive."

"I’d come to his place, he would cook me a steak with blue cheese on top, and then we’d have anal sex." thehairpin.com

"Warner Bros has tonight given the green light on a movie version of Entourage, the HBO series that ran from 2004-2011." deadline.com

“Procedure required that an arrest warrant be issued against the dinosaur itself, so the action became known as United States of America v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton.” newyorker.com

"If I had an opportunity to edit that, like many things I said, I would like to go back and change the words and meaning."

– Hagel at his hearing. cnn.com

"Batman, however, is still part of that grand pulp tradition of heroes who have to solve their lion-related problems with uppercuts."

comicsalliance.com

"It's no secret that Fred Flintstone started out as a cartoon and eventually wound up being a multiple vitamin."

grantland.com

“In most big Irish Catholic families, being loud and funny is a coping skill, a way to get heard above the din.”

OR: “The only scene in Slupsk is people eating horse meat to live and killing each other for potatoes.” But Mark already got to Simon Rich.