2000s Sayings And Quotes

If you take away just one thing from this book, let it be this: Hyper-gentrification and its free-market engine is neither natural nor inevitable. It is man-made, intentional, and therefore stoppable. And yet. Just as deniers of global warming insist that nothing out of the ordinary is happening to our world's climate, so deniers of hyper-gentrification say that noting out of the ordinary is happening to New York, and that its extreme transformation in the 2000s is just natural urban change. Let me be clear: I'm not talking about the weather. I'm talking about the climate, and New York's climate has been catastrophically changed.

Some researchers, such as psychologist Jean Twenge, say this new world where compliments are better than sex and pizza, in which the self-enhancing bias has been unchained and allowed to gorge unfettered, has led to a new normal in which the positive illusions of several generations have now mutated into full-blown narcissism. In her book The Narcissism Epidemic, Twenge says her research shows that since the mid-1980s, clinically defined narcissism rates in the United States have increased in the population at the same rate as obesity. She used the same test used by psychiatrists to test for narcissism in patients and found that, in 2006, one in four U.S. college students tested positive. That’s real narcissism, the kind that leads to diagnoses of personality disorders. In her estimation, this is a dangerous trend, and it shows signs of acceleration. Narcissistic overconfidence crosses a line, says Twenge, and taints those things improved by a skosh of confidence. Over that line, you become less concerned with the well-being of others, more materialistic, and obsessed with status in addition to losing all the restraint normally preventing you from tragically overestimating your ability to manage or even survive risky situations. In her book, Twenge connects this trend to the housing market crash of the mid-2000s and the stark increase in reality programming during that same decade. According to Twenge, the drive to be famous for nothing went from being strange to predictable thanks to a generation or two of people raised by parents who artificially boosted self-esteem to ’roidtastic levels and then released them into a culture filled with new technologies that emerged right when those people needed them most to prop up their self-enhancement biases. By the time Twenge’s research was published, reality programming had spent twenty years perfecting itself, and the modern stars of those shows represent a tiny portion of the population who not only want to be on those shows, but who also know what they are getting into and still want to participate. Producers with the experience to know who will provide the best television entertainment to millions then cull that small group. The result is a new generation of celebrities with positive illusions so robust and potent that the narcissistic overconfidence of the modern American teenager by comparison is now much easier to see as normal.

When society first starts flirting with accepting a marginalized group, that acceptance is often wrapped up in a born this way type narrative. For example, in the early 2000s, many straight allies claimed to support gay people because being gay wasn't a choice, and we couldn't help being the way that we are. There was a lot of pop science writing at that time exploring the search for the "gay gene," and suggesting that certain hormone exposures in the womb might predispose a fetus to being gay. Today we don't have conversations about the biological causes of gayness very much anymore. In the United States at least, being gay has started becoming accepted enough that queer people don't have to justify our existence by saying that we can't help but be this way. If someone were to choose to be gay, that wouldn't be a problem, because being gay is good. Similarly, Autistic people deserve acceptance not because we can't help but have the brains we have, but because being Autistic is good.

The lack of distinction between the real and the virtual is the obsession of our age. Everything in our current affairs attests to this, not to mention the big cinematic productions: The Truman Show, Total Recall, Existenz, Matrix, etc. This question has always been there behind literature and philosophy, but it has been present metaphorically, as it were, implicitly, through the filter of discourse. The 'encoding/decoding' of reality was done by discourse, that is to say, by a highly complex medium, never leaving room for a head-on truth. The encoding/decoding of our reality is done by technology. Only what is produced by this technical effect acquires visible reality. And it does so at the cost of a simplification that no longer has anything to do with language or with the slightest ambivalence and which, therefore, puts an end to this subtle lack of distinction between the real and the virtual, as subtle as the lack of distinction between good and evil. Through special effects, everything acquires an operational self-evidence, a spectacular reality that is, properly speaking, the reign of simulation. What the directors of these films have not realized (any more than the simulationist artists of New York in the eighties) is that simulation is a hypothesis, a game that turns reality itself into one eventuality among others.

It’s hard to get good answers to why most Young Voters are so uninterested in politics. This is probably because it’s next to impossible to get someone to think hard about why he’s not interested in something. The boredom itself preempts inquiry; the fact of the feeling’s enough. Surely one reason, though, is that politics is not cool. Or say rather that cool, interesting, alive people do not seem to be the ones who are drawn to the Political Process. Think back to the sort of kids in high school or college who were into running for student office: dweeby, overgroomed, obsequious to authority, ambitious in a sad way. Eager to play the Game. The kind of kids other kids would want to beat up if it didn’t seem so pointless and dull. And now consider some of 2000’s adult versions of these very same kids: Al Gore, best described by CNN sound tech Mark A. as “amazingly lifelike”; Steve Forbes with his wet forehead and loony giggle; G. Bush2’s patrician smirk and mangled cant; even Clinton himself with his big red fake-friendly face and “I feel your pain.” Men who aren’t enough like human beings even to dislike—what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is so often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about. It’s way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit. You probably don’t want to hear about all this, even.

Jason Kessler: My job that season was to drive around town and drop people’s scripts off at their houses. I very specifically remember going to John’s apartment in West Hollywood and he was playing video games with a friend. He invited me in to play. Normally, I would drop a script off at the door or I’d knock on the door and hand it to him, and someone would say, “Oh, thank you very much,” and just go in their house. John’s the only person who ever invited me in.

And then to have her be able to have this brave moment where she just—not for anybody else’s sake but just for her own sake—just proves herself. She was strong and she was confident that she owns herself now and that she’s brave enough with the thrill and the adrenaline to give this speech and say, “I miss you.

They basically notified us that they are closing production down because of the strike. They were like, “We don’t know when it will resume again, but you should consider yourself free to take other work.” And then, I will say, much to everyone’s appreciation, Greg Daniels wrote out a personal check to every single crew member for, I think it was either $ 1,000 or $ 1,200. It was literally just from him and his wife,

At one particular moment, with my eyes closed, I was crying and asking the question over and over aloud, „Does true love exist? Does true love exist in girls? Does true love exist? Does Sabrina love me? Does true love exist? Does true love exist?” - I had suddenly seen a flash. As if I was poking the Devil in the dark, staring too long into the darkness until it looked back at me as they say. I have never told anyone about this before. I try to describe what I had seen that night in that windowless, dark, and cold place deep inside under that big, old building, with my eyes closed. It made a half turn, flashing one of its eyes at me for a moment before disappearing again into the dark. As if it was nodding to me, I still get goosebumps years later when I try to describe it. As if it had been standing there all along, and just tried to reassure me that it had heard my question and would answer. Quite close. Just to make me be quiet finally. His eyes were yellow and red. I'm not actually sure if it had two eyes; I only saw one of them. One Evil Eye. Perhaps he had lost an eye, that's why I had seen the light of only one of them. His eye was malicious, but not particularly. It was more tired and angry yet understanding, as if he had heard this question over a billion times before from fools like me and I did not amuse him with my question and demand. As if he was about to show me a trick he had known for a long time. As if Satan had seen it all already. He knows all the tricks, he invented them, he inspired them all. As if he was bored of humanity already. (There is only One Evil Eye. The planet Saturn.) I was cuddling with Adam's cat, crying a lot, asking the darkness, about Love, and reflecting on Sabrina. Perhaps it was merely an optical illusion. I leave it up to the reader to decide what they believe about what I was facing and how I miraculously survived, as an atheist goy, as well as who truly supported me throughout the ordeal. If anyone or anything supported me in Spain at all. I had seen an advertisement somewhere saying that Miss Kittin would be playing on Saturday night, November 16th, 2013 in Barcelona at The Marhes. Satan. Saturn. Saturday. Coincidence? Maybe. So far. Perhaps. I knew I had to see her again after such a long time; she had been playing drum and bass in the early 2000s across the globe, and also in Budapest. I checked the map; The Marhes was next to Camp Nou, the FC Barcelona stadium. I thought of buying a bottle of champagne, which I didn't like, unless it’s Italian, but I wanted to celebrate, and I would walk along Avenida Roma to get there straight. I knew I'd get drunk; I didn't want to drive, I wanted to arrive intoxicated. I re-posted the Miss Kittin party’s flyer, on Instagram, writing underneath it : ‘All roads lead to Rome.

In Nigeria, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has granted US$74 million so far for HIV, all of it for work with the ‘general population’. Nigeria gets large slabs from PEPFAR, too, US$105 million in 2006 and rising; 90 per cent of the prevention money was going to ‘general population’ interventions.4 ‘Youth’ is an especially popular focus for prevention efforts in Nigeria, even though HIV tests in several thousand recent graduates from technical college showed that just 1.2 per cent were infected–hardly a sign of an epidemic that is out of control among young people in the general population. Meanwhile, Nigeria has a vibrant sex industry. I can’t say how vibrant because the national programme has until now more or less ignored commercial sex. In a national survey in 2003, 3 per cent of men said they visited a prostitute in the last year, so that would be 1.2 million clients right there, and the probable total is a lot higher.5 There are no estimates of how many women sell sex, and there’s no routine HIV surveillance among sex workers. Sporadic studies are not encouraging. In 2003, 21 per cent of sex workers in the western city of Ibadan and 48 per cent in nearby Saki were infected with HIV.6 Of course, we don’t have a clue how much HIV is spread in sex between men in Nigeria, because no one has asked–the first studies got underway only in 2007. Scattered assessments in drug injectors in eight Nigerian cities in the early 2000s showed that they were as yet no more likely to be infected with HIV than non-injectors, which suggests that there’s still a chance to prevent a major epidemic in this group.7 But how much of the millions of dollars sloshing around for HIV prevention in Nigeria is being spent on drug injectors? As of mid-2007, none.

Print media started collapsing in the mid-2000s. When I first started out, it seemed like alternative news weeklies were the future of newspapers. It was a booming industry. It was a product of the nineties and that nineties mentality. At the time, I had a day job at the University of Virginia and I was sending my strip out and picked up one paper here and another paper there very gradually. I was building up a client list and then that fateful day where Village Voice Media dropped comics across the entire chain. I was actually spared the worst of that. I think I was just in the Village Voice at the time, but that was a big loss. [laughs] Not that the pay was all that great, but it had been my goal to get into that paper. At the time I really wasn’t sure whether I would be able to continue, but then dailykos came along and picked up a bunch of alt weekly cartoonists and breathed some life into our industry online. They did really well on dailykos they were shared a lot and got good traffic and I think it set a precedent. Not that it was the first home for political cartoons online, but something about dailykos at that moment turned the tide a bit. A few more websites started running political cartoons – and paying fairly for them. People started realizing that they were highly shareable and that they could do well online. I’ll add that print has stabilized. At least it had stabilized under the second Obama administration. I actually added papers during that time. I wouldn’t say this is a growth industry. I think it would be very hard to break into now, but I did get the sense that print media had stabilized and some papers were doing okay. For me it’s really a hybrid now between print and digital. Certainly the digital side of things has grown the most in the past few years. (Interview with Comicsbeat)

What, and now we’re going for that early-2000s emo angle?” I say. “Find a happy medium.

This book should never have happened. If it wasn’t for the most bizarre and twisted sequence of events involving a diverse array of people it wouldn’t have. Let us explain. If someone we, the authors, had wanted to impress - a publisher, say, or a book reviewer - had asked us how it had emerged, we could have come up with all kinds of things to establish our credentials for writing it. But they would have been only a small part of the story of how it came about, and not the interesting bit either. The truth is much more human and fascinating - and it also gets to the heart of the book and shows how networks really work. Greg has always been fascinated by ‘network theory’ - the findings of sociologists, mathematicians and physicists, which seemed to translate to the real world of links between people. Early in his professional life at Auto Trader magazine in Canada he got to see an extraordinary network of buyers and sellers in operation. Later, when he became a venture capitalist - someone who invests in new or young companies, hoping that some of them will become very valuable - he applied what he’d learned. He invested in businesses that could benefit from the way networks behave, and this approach yielded some notable successes. Richard came from a different slant. For twenty years, he was a ‘strategy consultant’, using economic analysis to help firms become more profitable than their rivals. He ended up co-founding LEK, the fastest-growing ‘strategy boutique’ of the 1980s, with offices in the US, Europe and Asia. He also wrote books on business strategy, and in particular championed the ‘star business’ idea, which stated that the most valuable venture was nearly always a ‘star’, defined as the biggest firm in a high-growth market. In the 1990s and 2000s, Richard successfully invested the money he had made as a management consultant in a series of star ventures. He also read everything available about networks, feeling intuitively that they were another reason for business success, and might also help explain why some people’s careers took off while equally intelligent and qualified people often languished. So, there were good reasons why Greg and Richard might want to write a book together about networks. But the problem with all such ‘formal’ explanations is that they ignore the human events and coincidences that took place before that book could ever see the light of day. The most

There were certainly multiple factors contributing to these men’s post-moonwalk slump, but the question What do you do after walking on the moon? became a gigantic speed bump. The trouble with moonwalkers and billionaires is when they arrive at the top, their momentum often stops. If they don’t manage to find something to parlay, they turn into the kid on the jungle gym who just hangs from the ring. Not coincidentally, this is the same reason that only one-third of Americans are happy at their jobs. When there’s no forward momentum in our careers, we get depressed, too. As Newton pointed out, an object at rest tends to stay at rest. So how does one avoid billionaire’s depression? Or regular person’s stuck-in-a-dead-end-job, lack-of-momentum-fueled depression? Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile took on the question in the mid-2000s in a research study of white-collar employees. She tasked 238 pencil pushers in various industries to keep daily work diaries. The workers answered open-ended questions about how they felt, what events in their days stood out. Amabile and her fellow researchers then dissected the 12,000 resulting entries, searching for patterns in what affects people’s “inner” work lives the most dramatically. The answer, it turned out, is simply progress. A sense of forward motion. Regardless how small. And that’s the interesting part. Amabile found that minor victories at work were nearly as psychologically powerful as major breakthroughs. To motivate stuck employees, as Amabile and her colleague Steven J. Kramer suggest in their book, The Progress Principle, businesses need to help their workers experience lots of tiny wins. (And as we learned from the bored BYU students in chapter 1, breaking up big challenges into tiny ones also speeds up progress.) This is helpful to know when motivating employees. But it also hints at what billionaires and astronauts can do to stave off the depression that follows the high of getting to the top. To get out of the funk, say Joan DiFuria and Stephen Goldbart, cofounders of the Money, Meaning & Choices Institute, depressed successes simply have to start the Olympic rings over. Some use their money to create new businesses. Others parlay sideways and get into philanthropy. And others simply pick up hobbies that take time to master. Even if the subsequent endeavors are smaller than their previous ones, the depression dissipates as they make progress.