Part of the reason forward-thinking media networks like Twitter succeed is because people3 want to believe that every immaterial thing they do is pertinent by default; it’s interesting because it happened to them, which translates as interesting to all.
Nothing is completely authentic. Even the guys who kill themselves are partially acting.
In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person – the “journey” of a particular “hero,” in the lingo of the mythologist Joseph Campbell – as a prism for understanding everything else.
The Constitution is awesome, but still overrated; it’s like Pet Sounds. The wide-scale adoption of political correctness was silly, but not unreasonable. The freedom that was lost was mostly theoretical and rarely necessary. No one is significantly worse off.
If I were an adult, I would be drinking coffee; as it is, I’m drinking Mountain Dew.
An author I know once explained why writing became so much more difficult in the twenty-first century: “The biggest problem in my life,” he said, “is that my work machine is also my pornography delivery machine.
In a roundabout way, Boba Fett created Pearl Jam.
It is crazy,” said the nervous little man I’d followed up the street. “That’s the only thing you learn in law school that’s useful: Laws are crazy on purpose. Everything is negotiable. If you make a law complicated enough, you can apply it any way you want. You just need to make sure it’s so complicated that no normal person can understand it, unless they went to law school.
We now have immediate access to all possible facts. Which is almost the same as having none at all.
Nobody ever talks about building a time machine in order to go back and kill Judas.
He had a communications director named Hope Hicks. It’s not like this was some kind of brilliant subterfuge.
No stories were viral. No celebrity was trending. The world was still big. The country was still vast. You could just be a little person, with your own little life and your own little thoughts. You didn’t have to have an opinion, and nobody cared if you did or did not. You could be alone on purpose, even in a crowd.
The flights were hijacked, the planes crashed into buildings, 2,977 people died, and the nineties collapsed with the skyscrapers.
Every time period that’s ever transpired has seemed unprecedented to the people who happened to live through it; no one has ever believed the Chinese aphorism ‘May you live in interesting times’ did not apply to the life they were coincidentally living.
Seinfeld was the most popular, most transformative live-action show on television. It altered the language and shifted comedic sensibilities, and almost every random episode was witnessed by more people than the 2019 finale of Game of Thrones.
In 1992, bragging about your area code was a collective expression of the community where you were. By 2002, it was an individual connection to the place you had left.
I don’t understand this whole thing about computers and the superhighway,” sci-fi novelist Ray Bradbury told an audience of college students in 1995. “Who wants to be in touch with all of those people?
The video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany. But Nevermind is the inflection point where one style of Western culture ends and another begins, mostly for reasons only vaguely related to music.
The flavor was nothing like beer. It was closer to cheap champagne mixed with Sprite, and – unlike beer – it was the opposite of an acquired taste. Every new Zima went down slightly worse than the previous Zima. There was, however, something perversely enticing about a drink that seemed to come from a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which color did not exist.
The concept of “selling out” – and the degree to which that notion altered the meaning and perception of almost everything – is the single most nineties aspect of the nineties.