Pop Culture References Quotes

That’s the problem with you nearly immortal types,” I said. “You couldn’t spot a pop culture reference if it skittered up and implanted an embryo down your esophagus.

I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism.

Top Gun,” I whispered to Lindsey. We’d started pointing out Luc’s ubiquitous pop culture references, having decided that because he cut his fangs in the Wild West, he’d been entranced by movies and television. You know, because living in a society of magically enhanced vampires didn’t require enough willing suspension of disbelief. -Merit in Chloe Neill’s Friday Night Bites

Bollocks, bitches, and Battlestar Galactica,” I mumbled. I have a bad habit of mumbling curse words when I’m aggravated; honestly, I think I might have a mild case of Tourette’s. To soften the string of foul language and make me feel like less of a freak, I try to throw in a pop culture reference at the end. It usually works, but not today.

The manager turned up his palms. "I don't have those answers, Samirah, but Huginn and Muninn will brief you privately. Go with them to the high places of Valhalla. Let them show you thoughts and memories." To me, that sounded like some trippy vision quest with Darth Vader appearing in a foggy cave.

Girl, we need to get you on a study program, fast. You're not going to last a week around here if you can't keep up with the pop culture references. How about Lord of the Rings? Firefly? Doctor Horrible? No? Clearly we have a lot of work to do.

I'm bringing body back. Returning corpses, but they're not intact. Kids, this is a Justin Timberlake reference. You're fine not knowing who that is.

I like YOU! I’ve liked you since before hitting puberty! Since before dinosaurs walked the Earth! Since before the old Taylor Swift died!

He looked at Phillip and said, “I love this plan! I’m excited to be a part of it. Let’s do it!” Phillip said, “Ghostbusters.” He smiled, part out of admiration, part because he was delighted to get a pop culture reference for once.

There seems to be a vicious cycle at work here, making ours not just an economy but a culture of extreme inequality. Corporate decision makers, and even some two-bit entrepreneurs like my boss at The Maids, occupy an economic position miles above that of the underpaid people whose labor they depend on. For reasons that have more to do with class — and often racial — prejudice than with actual experience, they tend to fear and distrust the category of people from which they recruit their workers. Hence the perceived need for repressive management and intrusive measures like drug and personality testing. But these things cost money — $20,000 or more a year for a manager, $100 a pop for a drug test, and so on — and the high cost of repression results in ever more pressure to hold wages down. The larger society seems to be caught up in a similar cycle: cutting public services for the poor, which are sometimes referred to collectively as the 'social wage,' while investing ever more heavily in prisons and cops. And in the larger society, too, the cost of repression becomes another factor weighing against the expansion or restoration of needed services. It is a tragic cycle, condemning us to ever deeper inequality, and in the long run, almost no one benefits but the agents of repression themselves.

Must you always speak with so many pop culture references?" "I must, yes, but no one's making pop culture anymore, so I'm starting to feel dated. I haven't seen a new movie in two years. And you know what else I just realized?" The doctor stared at him. "I'm never going to find out what the hell was going on with Lost. I mean, was it just sheer coincidence their plane crashed on the island or was it this Jacob guy pulling the strings all along? And how did most of them end up back in the 1970s with the Dharma people?

I often use comic books, video games, or other nerdy pop-culture references in my writing; it helps me understand the more complicated parts of the world a little more easily since, culturally, it’s the ocean I swim in. For example, yesterday I compared committing to a romantic relationship to Harry Potter’s prophecy to kill Voldemort.

In fact, pop-cultural references have become such potent metaphors in U.S. fiction not only because of how united Americans are in our exposure to mass images but also because of our guilty indulgent psychology with respect to that exposure. Put simply, the pop reference works so well in contemporary fiction because (1) we all recognize such a reference, and (2) we're all a little uneasy about how we all recognize such a reference.

Sinead and Prince are right. Nothing, absolutely nothing can compare to the real stuff.

I miss Ariana Grande!

Then, just for a blessed few hours, he had climbed out of that chopper into the high, cold, piney air of Bhutan, and gone for a ramble in the king’s Land Rover, and hiked up a misty mountain that had struck him as being straight from a 1970s album cover. And he had done some introspection about the fact that he couldn’t even take such a lovely place at face value but only liken it to such pop culture references.

[The public intellectual] will also describe how she can work a pop culture reference into her essay, comparing the Supreme Court to the creature in the number-one box office movie of the moment. Editors like this sort of mass-media integration, first, because it gives them a way to illustrate the piece, and second because they are under the delusion that pop-culture references will propel a piece's readership into the five-digit area.

What is one to do against an enemy whose weapons are conformism and stupidity? Should one make oneself more conformist and more stupid? If his strategy lies in cunning and achievement, should one make oneself more cunning, more of an achiever? Should one make oneself more mediatic than the media?

Now think of a professor who faces you from the front of the room; who makes eye contact with the audience; who has invested time and energy thinking about how you think; who pays attention to your attention span; who is aware of what words you know and what words or concepts confuse you; who knows the demographics of the audience—age, gender, nationality, ethnicity, political leanings, cultural leanings, propensity to laugh, to cry; who carries some pop-culture fluency, for easy reference and analogy, but only when teaching the subject can be assisted by such references. That person is not lecturing to you. That person has opened conduits tailored to that audience in that moment, and at that time. That’s communicating.

Para Mary, o problema era claro: ali estava uma possibilidade de trabalho, a qual devia ser aproveitada sem hesitação; Feld pagava bem e a atividade televisiva proporcionaria enorme prestígio; todas as semanas, no final do programa de Coelho Hentman, o nome de Chuck, como um dos escritores, surgiria na tela, para todo o mundo não-comuna. Mary sentiria orgulho, e aí residia o fator-chave: o trabalho do marido seria notavelmente criativo. E para Mary, a criatividade era o abre-te-sésamo da vida; o trabalho para a CIA, programando simulacros para propaganda que tagarelavam mensagens para africanos, latino-americanos e asiáticos incultos, não dava asas à criatividade; as mensagens costumavam ser as mesmas e, de qualquer maneira, a CIA era dona de má reputação nos círculos liberais, vanguardistas e sofisticados frequentados por Mary.

Soiree in Rome. The women are more attractive than the men - they always are. My first impression is that all the men are ugly (they are producers and film directors) and that all the women are beautiful (they are actresses). On a second view: the men are ugly, but they have character; all the women have something erotic about them, but nothing remarkable - a purely macho society, the world of showbiz. The big scene with the male lead is played out in all its grandeur, from one palazzo to the next in the Roman night. The most beautiful actress I know is marrying a rich director, author of 97 screenplays. This is the rule among the showbiz crowd. As usual I feel alienation from all the men there and solidarity with all the women, whom the men pretend to scorn in order to please them, but to whom they are basically indifferent. It must be nice to live in bodies so beautiful, so ingenuous, and allow the men to dominate you with all their ugliness, wealth and pretensions. It must be marvellous to be a woman. Ultimately, it is this which is fascinating: woman is unimaginable. The more beautiful she is, the more unimaginable.

Velizy. All those shepherds in the Pyrenees who are being fitted out with fibre optics, radio relay stations and cable TV. Obviously the stakes are pretty high! And not just in social terms. Did these people think they were already living in society, with their neighbours, their animals, their stories? What a scandalously underdeveloped condition they were in, what a monstrous deprivation of all the blessings of information, what barbaric solitude they were kept in, with no possibility of expressing themselves, or anything. We used to leave them in peace. If they were called on, it was to get them to come and die in the towns, in the factories or in a war. Why have we suddenly developed a need for them, when they have no need of anything? What do we want them to serve as witnesses of? Because we'll force them to if we have to: the new terror has arrived, not the terror of 1984, but that of the twenty-first century. The new negritude has arrived, the new servitude. There is already a roll-call of the martyrs of information. The Bretons whose TV pictures are restored as soon as possible after the relay stations have been blown up . . . Velizy . . . in the Pyrenees. The new guinea pigs. The new hostages. Crucified on the altar of information, pilloried at their consoles. Buried alive under information. All this to make them admit the inexpressible service that is being done to them, to extort from them a confession of their sociality, of their 'normal' condition as associated anthropoids. Socialism is destroying the position of the intellectual. Unlearn what they say. Either they don't believe in it themselves or the violent effort they make to believe in it is disagreeable.

The law that is imposed on us is the law of the confusion of categories. Everything is sexual. Everything is political. Everything is aesthetic. All at once. Everything has acquired a political meaning, especially since 1968; and it is not just everyday life but also madness, language, the media, even desire, that are politicized as they enter the sphere of liberation, the sphere of mass processes. Likewise everything has become sexual, anything can be an object of desire: power, knowledge - everything is interpreted in terms of phantasies, in terms of repression, and sexual stereotypy reigns in every last corner. Likewise, too, everything is now aestheticized: politics is aestheticized in the spectacle, sex in advertising and porn, and all kinds of activity in what is conventionally referred to as culture - a sort of all-pervasive media- and advertising-led semiologization: 'culture degree Xerox' . Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories. When everything is political, nothing is political any more, the word itself is meaningless. When everything is sexual, nothing is sexual any more, and sex loses its determinants. When everything is aesthetic, nothing is beautiful or ugly any more, and art itself disappears. This paradoxical state of affairs, which is simultaneously the complete actualization of an idea, the perfect realization of the whole tendency of modernity, and the negation of that idea and that tendency, their annihilation by virtue of their very success, by virtue of their extension beyond their own bounds - this state of affairs is epitomized by a single figure: the transpolitical, the transsexual, the transaesthetic.

So what can we generalize about Victorian vampires? They are already dead, yet not exactly dead, and clammy-handed. They can be magnetically repelled by crucifixes and they don’t show up in mirrors. No one is safe; vampires prey upon strangers, family, and lovers. Unlike zombies, vampires are individualists, seldom traveling in packs and never en masse. Many suffer from mortuary halitosis despite our reasonable expectation that they would no longer breathe. But our vampires herein also differ in interesting ways. Some fear sunlight; others do not. Many are bound by a supernatural edict that forbids them to enter a home without some kind of invitation, no matter how innocently mistaken. Dracula, for example, greets Jonathan Harker with this creepy exclamation that underlines another recurring theme, the betrayal of innocence (and also explains why I chose Stoker’s story “Dracula’s Guest” as the title of this anthology): “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will.” Yet other vampires seem immune to this hospitality prohibition. One common bit of folklore was that you ought never to refer to a suspected vampire by name, yet in some tales people do so without consequence. Contrary to their later presentation in movies and television, not all Victorian vampires are charming or handsome or beautiful. Some are gruesome. Some are fiends wallowing in satanic bacchanal and others merely contagious victims of fate, à la Typhoid Mary. A few, in fact, are almost sympathetic figures, like the hero of a Greek epic who suffers the anger of the gods. Curious bits of other similar folklore pop up in scattered places. Vampires in many cultures, for example, are said to be allergic to garlic. Over the centuries, this aromatic herb has become associated with sorcerers and even with the devil himself. It protected Odysseus from Circe’s spells. In Islamic folklore, garlic springs up from Satan’s first step outside the Garden of Eden and onion from his second. Garlic has become as important in vampire defense as it is in Italian cooking. If, after refilling your necklace sachet and outlining your window frames, you have some left over, you can even use garlic to guard your pets or livestock—although animals luxuriate in soullessness and thus appeal less to the undead. The vampire story as we know it was born in the early nineteenth century. As

Goosing my own Maverick.

Everybody likes to eat, and you never know who likes to read until you bring up a few pop culture references. That’s where you separate the TV watchers and moviegoers from the readers.

She walked confidently next to him. Her black hair was slicked down and tucked behind her ear. "To better fight Guardians with, my pretty," she had told him earlier that morning.

Truth be told, the reality show itself quickly degenerated into a televisual soap opera that was not that different than old variety shows made for large audiences. And its audience was amplified at the usual rate of competing media, which leads to the self- propagation of the show via a prophetic method: self-fulfilling prophecy. In the end, the ratings for the show play part of the spiral and return cycle of the advertising flame. But all of this is of little interest. It is only the original idea which has any value: submitting a group to a sensory deprivation experiment ( Which in other times was a form of calculated torture. But are we not in the middle of exploring all the historical forms of torture, served in homeopathic doses, under the guise of mass culture or avant-garde art? This is precisely one of the principle themes of contemporary art.), in order to record the behavior of human molecules within a vacuum - and no doubt with the design of watching them tear each other apart in the artificial promiscuity. We have not yet reached this point, but this existential micro-situation functions as a universal metaphor for the modern being, holed up in his personal loft, which is no longer his physical or mental universe. It is his digital and tactile universe, of Turing’s “spectral body”, of the digital man, captured within the labyrinth of the networks, of man turned into his own (white) mouse.

There are no more fundamental rules, no more criteria of judgement or of pleasure. In the aesthetic realm of today there is no longer any God to recognize his own. Or, to use a different metaphor, there is no gold standard of aesthetic judgement or pleasure. The situation resembles that of a currency which may not be exchanged: it can only float, its only reference itself, impossible to convert into real value or wealth. Art, too, must circulate at top speed, and is impossible to exchange. 'Works' of art are indeed no longer exchanged, whether for each other or against a referential value. They no longer have that secret collusiveness which is the strength of a culture. We no longer read such works - we merely decode them according to ever more contradictory criteria. Nothing in this sphere conflicts with anything else. Neo-Geometrism, Neo-Expressionism, New Abstraction, New Representationalism - all coexist with a marvellous facility amid general indifference. It is only because none of these tendencies has any soul of its own that they can all inhabit the same cultural space; only because they arouse nothing but profound indifference in us that we can accept them all simultaneously.

There is certainly some interplay between body and mind. The weaker the body, the more apparent the organic wretchedness or obsolescence of that machine, the freer and the more adventurous one's thinking becomes. It too partakes of that sort of timeless youth which has nothing whatever to do with being in the prime of life. Thinking lives on neither health nor vitality, but on lucidity and pride, and the decaying of the body stimulates that lucidity and that pride. There is nothing worse than this obligation to research, to seek out references and documentation that has taken up residence in the realm of thought and which is the mental and obsessional equivalent of hygiene. In the 'intellectual field', as it is so aptly called, one has to plough the furrow of the concept. It is true that we no longer have a culture of leisure, in which thought and writing were violent and pleasurable. And our leisure now is no more than the charnel-house where dead time is born.

There is more to fashion than a sociology of distinction can express. It is a collective passion. Culture in general is more than a differential mechanism, it is the form of prestige which a whole society without distinction confers upon itself, by an impassioned concatenation of forms, of language, of signs, which is a challenge to the grammatical order of differences, though at the same time rooted within it. It seems we have lost this demiurgic version of culture and lapsed into the semio- and sociological version.

Dallas. The scriptwriters have each of the actresses in the soap opera play the death scene in the swimming pool: they do not know which of them is to die, and hence disappear from the series. The 'soap' becomes their destiny. If they should die in reality, a way is devised for writing them out of the script. If they are sacrificed in the script, their stardom inevitably comes to an end in real life too, since they are identified with the characters they play. It is the same as in a ceremony: outside the ritual, you count for nothing, but the ritual is flexible enough to make use of all the chance happenings of life. Dallas 's secret lies in its closeness to tribal and initiatory stereotypes. That is why there is never any laughter in it: no wit, no humour, no comic episodes, no happy coincidences. It is a closed world in which everything leads inevitably to fatality, perfidy, sentimental incest or magical cannibalism. Such is the tribal law, of which J.R. is the emblem, which gives rise to the desperate efforts on the part of the women to escape from this archaic trap. In its artless cruelty, Dallas is superior to any 'intelligent' critique that can be made of it. That is why intellectual snobbery meets its match here. In a dream I saw the face of servitude. It is the face of a woman with heavy lidded, blue, expressionless eyes. The crescent shapes of her breasts are asymmetrical. She always has a smile for the poorest as she crawls off daintily towards infinity. Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.

Brilliant little irruptions Brilliant little connections Brilliant little illusions Brilliant little lips Brilliant little altercations Very brilliant little honey combs Brilliant little adversities Very brilliant little ravages Brilliant little cogs Brilliant little circumvolutions Around a vertical axis Why has the deficiency of the mentally deficient become a cultural fact, whereas the very much more terrible fact of ordinary stupidity strikes no one as very odd?

Let us not be deceived about the cool forms, forms indifferent to themselves, which this fetishism can assume in Warhol. Behind this machinic snobbery, what is really going on is a rise and rise of objects, images, signs and simulacra, as well as a rise and rise of values, the finest example of which is the art market itself. We are a long way from the alienation of price, which is still a real measure of things. We are in the ecstasy of value, which explodes the notion of market and simultaneously destroys the art work as such. Warhol is naturally party to this extermination of the real by the image, and to such an overdoing of the image as to put an end to all aesthetic value. Warhol reintroduces nothingness into the heart of the image. In this sense, we cannot say he is not a great artist: fortunately for him, he is not an artist at all. The point of his work is a challenge to the very notion of art and aesthetics.

The Korean wave of popular culture is called “Hallyu.” You should learn the word, since you’ll be seeing a lot of it. U.S. President Barack Obama referred to it during a March 2012 visit to South Korea, in the context of discussing the nation’s technical and pop culture innovations. He said: “It’s no wonder so many people around the world have caught the Korean Wave—Hallyu.

So there was no explicit bonding. Certainly not the kind you might be expecting if you like films like The Parent Trap as much as Mizuko and I did. We watched it together once, and I dared to say that we were like two little Lindsay Lohans in the isolation cabin, to which she made a kind of grunt.

After my dalliance is the world of one-night stands, I was well versed in the ups and downs of sleeping with strangers. To misquote Forrest Gump (a pop culture reference, incidentally, that Nick din't get), one-nights stands are like a box of chocolates. Most of the time you get the generic inoffensive ones. Sometimes an orange cream, the ones no one really likes but eats out of desperation. Occasionally, but rarely, a chocolate-covered caramel.

It's been forever since we watched Friends. Besides, you're the one who made me sit through that show." "Because if it was up to you, we would've watched Bewitched reruns every night." "I Love Lucy," Alisha muttered. "And you say you're not a boomer." "Whatever. You're just bitter my mind is more sophisticated than yours and didn't immediately make the leap year to pop culture when I met Quentin." "Oh, okay." Simone crossed her arms, and the gold cuff on her wrist flashed in the sunlight. "You're gonna stand there and tell me you and your minion Meg haven't been dropping Jurassic Park references since he showed up?" Tongue in her cheek, Alisha scowled. "I hate you so much." "Behold, my sister the meganerd." Cackling, Simone struck a Vanna White pose.

Back in North Carolina, the small office in the English Department I shared with another graduate student for our teaching assignments looked like a decorator's version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, one where Jekyll loved Stranger Things, Funko Pops, and artistically desaturated wedding photos, and Hyde loved death row cinder block walls.

Yes, I'm familiar with the bookcases in your bedroom. I don't remember seeing any pornography." Feather just stares for a moment. "That's because I don't read pornography...unless Twilight counts." "Which it does. In the sense that it appeals to—" "I get it. Do you think that Pattinson guy is cute?" Jessica stares. "What?" "Twilight you've seen? But not Ginger Snaps. You are such an idiot. And the answer is no. But Kristin Stewart is pretty hot in a movie about Lizzie Borden that I know you've never seen if you missed Ginger.

In the censored-city, our only access to the outside is through the cloud. Sometimes I feel safer here, with all the screeds of data smog and oversaturated pop culture references condensed to their basic minimum. I mean, the sheer amount of input to our system has long since exceeded our processing capacity. We all felt the same way. Spam and social media had taken over everything. I remember it, clear as day.

I don't avoid Starbucks because it's Satanic, I avoid Starbucks because they over-roast their beans. Satanic is just a bonus.

Jack." "Last name?" "Let's leave it at Jack," he said. "Unfortunately, the online form insists on a last name before it will allow me to move to the next page." I held up the tablet to show him the screen. "How about Jack Spratt? Jack Frost? Jack Sparrow? Jack Horner? Do you have a beanstalk? Do you kill giants? Have you built a house? Are you nimble?" "How about something not fantasy-based?" With a soft chuckle, he moved closer to study the screen. "Jack Dawson? Jack Skellington?" I tried to ignore the heat of his body, the warm breath across my cheek. "Jack-Jack Parr? Jack Torrance? Jack Pearson? Jack Reacher? Jack Ryan?" His laughter, deep and rich, filled the room. "You know your Jacks." "I like movies. I'll watch anything so long as I'm not watching it alone. Sharing snarky comments is all part of the fun." "I think doing anything with you would be fun." His smile made me smile. I couldn't stop it. Were we flirting? Was that a flirting smile? Was I flirting with a thief?

But similarly, I would get upset not that people didn’t like it, but sometimes the reason they’d put forth for not liking it made it clear they really hadn’t seen the show. Or they hadn’t seen it in years. There’s a lot of shows that occupied that sort of geek pop-culture space, where if you didn’t get certain references, you were excluded from the show, but we always tried to make Big Bang an open tent. And sure, that was tricky sometimes… but you didn’t need to understand the reference to get the joke. We always tried to be inclusive, so people from all walks of life liked it, or people who weren’t really interested in science or pop culture, people who didn’t grow up involved in those things, loved these characters, too. And that’s a testament to this cast, who were just incredible.

In fact, pop-cultural references have become such potent metaphors in U.S. fiction not only because of how united Americans are in our exposure to mass images but also because of our guilty indulgent psychology with respect to that exposure.

turns out patty’s a party animal, writes another, along with a GIF of Kristen Wiig dressed like a drunk Cinderella on an old episode of Saturday Night Live.

If you think you got away with making a High School Musical reference without me mercilessly mocking you for it, you’re wrong. I’m saving it for later

Is this the source of the social trouble your sister is having?” “I think so. She seems to want to be friends with them, but I’m not sure why. They seem awful.” “Like the Plastics.” “Like the what?” “From the movie Mean Girls.” “I haven’t seen it.” Marie was tickled that she could pull out an American pop culture reference Leo didn’t know.

Seu trabalho, de que pessoalmente gostava bastante, consistia em programar simulacros do serviço de inteligência do governo Cheyenne, elaborar os intermináveis programas de propaganda, promovendo a desordem no círculo dos Estados Comunistas que circundavam os Estados Unidos. Interiormente, acreditava profundamente em seu trabalho, mas racionalmente não podia qualificá-lo como um ofício nobre ou muito bem pago; os programas por ele elaborados eram no mínimo infantis, espúrios e tendenciosos. O interesse principal ficava por conta de garotos de escola, tanto dos Estados Unidos quanto dos Estados Comunistas vizinhos, além dos contingentes numerosos de adultos de base educacional inferior. Na verdade, ele era um medíocre. O que Mary evidenciara várias e várias vezes. Medíocre ou não, continuava em seu emprego, embora outros lhe tivessem sido oferecidos durante os seis anos de casamento. Possivelmente porque apreciava ouvir suas próprias palavras pronunciadas pelos simulacros, imitações do homem. Talvez por sentir que a causa em si era fundamental: os Estados Unidos postaram-se na defensiva, política e economicamente, e tinham de proteger-se. Necessitavam de pessoas que trabalhassem para o governo ganhando salários reconhecidamente baixos, em funções desprovidas de qualidades de heroísmo ou projeção. Alguém devia programar os simulacros para a propaganda, os quais eram espalhados em todo o mundo, com o objetivo de realizar o trabalho de representantes das Autoridades de Inteligência Computadorizada, agitando, convencendo, induzindo. Mas…

References, though, when they’re not cheap and transparent, they’re effective.

Always the impatient one.” “You sound like Yoda.” “Yoda is a very wise alien, and you’d do well to listen to his teachings on how he trained Skywalker.” I folded my arms across my chest. “Seriously, dude?” He shrugged. “I just thought I’d make a reference to pop culture.” “Okay. Whatever.

As creators and consumers they fill the field of pop culture today, which is an economic enterprise and only by accident occasionally has something to do with art. Art objects are now commonly referred to as “product” by those who handle them and only make news when they are sold for absurdly large sums or are stolen.

By “good deal,” Lee is referring to the world’s worst-kept secret: North Korea makes these threats to extort money from the rest of the world, in the form of “humanitarian aid.” South

Pop music does not throw the same cultural weight it once did; its ideas and challenges are no longer central to social movements. In the UK and US, ruinously expensive tuition fees and cuts to art education have narrowed the range of class backgrounds that art students are coming from. But the magpie cultural education that pop music provided has left a strong legacy ... Postmodernism, and all its liquid games of reference, was not just an idea incubated by the art gallery, the academy, or the architecture studio; it came from pop’s intellectual permissiveness. The pretensions of individuals from all walks of life—their ambition, their curiosity, their desires to make the world around them a more interesting place—is cultural literacy in action.

But if some of the pieces make you laugh, I will be happy, and if they persuade even one person to try reading Plato who otherwise wouldn't have done so then I will know I have not wasted my time.

There are at least two things someone can do to convince me to never take them seriously: (a) engage in bad-faith arguments about people being “canceled” when what they’re really referring to is people being called out and/or held accountable for their actions, and (b) accuse someone of “making everything about race” merely for pointing out something racist.

Mrs.Gregory from U.S. History is one of the chaperones. She’s going around, trying to keep girls from grinding on their dates. She might as well try to keep the moon from rising.

She’d learned quickly what words older men used when they preyed on younger girls, what phrases they trotted out when trying to pretend to be cool college-aged bad boys rather than the sad fiftysomethings they were in real life. Can you keep a secret? they asked her, time and again. But she’d also learned slang, learned how it could sound lead-heavy in the wrong voice, clunky and obvious. She learned she could tell the age of a person from their pop culture references or punctuation use, the location of a person by what they called a water fountain or soda. The gender of a person by how they talked about women. She learned how to find the patterns. She began to read sentences as if they were fingerprints, the construction of each as distinct as the whorls on skin.