Michelle Dean

“I don't care about the bare fact that anyone liked or didn't like a book or movie; they can only interest me in that bare fact by writing an intelligent review.”

“Hillbilly stereotypes have always made it easier for middle-class whites to presume that racism is the exclusive province of 'that kind' of person.”

“The 'World Wide Web', as people quaintly called the Internet in 1996, was more or less made up of text. There was no YouTube. There was no Facebook. There was, however, Usenet, a loose and difficult-to-navigate assortment of message boards.”

“Donald Trump is a man who likes to think he has few equals.”

“The podcast revolution has taught us that women's voices aren't just pleasurable to listen to, they are essential.”

“It is no secret, of course, that people have strong feelings about fat - feelings that seem only to have been inflamed by the sense, in western countries, that there is an obesity crisis afoot. Concerns about health have mutated into a kind of panic attending any mention of fat people at all.”

“The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering.”

“We do learn a thing or two from art. It may not be the one-to-one instruction of a moral lesson or the rote learning of a grammatical rule or mathematical concept. But the habits of mind art cultivates are important.”

“While 'Twilight''s popularity was undeniable among both the teenagers they were aimed at and middle-aged women who flocked to the series in droves, Meyer has drawn her share of criticism for her writing. Some feminist critics assailed what they saw as Bella's mooning over her vampire lover.”

“The first thing I remember feeling about the 2016 U.S. election was a kind of speechlessness.”

“There is an unfortunate side effect of being a person of few words: Sometimes people will assume you are less intelligent than you are.”

“Prestige podcasts, like prestige television shows, tend to have an audience that believes itself literate, well-informed, and reasonable. Listening to podcasts, in this model, is a form of virtue.”

“Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing.”

“Self-publishing has been a dubious challenge to traditional publishers, at best.”

“There has long been an argument in New York about what, exactly, the purpose of book awards ought to be. One model sees them as a celebration of the unquestioned best and brightest, a triumphal parade for marquee authors who have published in a given year.”

“Television became defensible - and, frankly, worshipped - because the shows started to be so carefully structured, so attentive to language, and so visually interesting that they suddenly caught people's eye.”

“The desire to abdicate, to give up - for me, that's primal.”

“People spend their entire lives trying to construct something to grab onto: a family, a home, a business. Rarely does anyone seem to manage to get much ground under their feet.”

“Trump has been fiercely mocked in the media since the 1980s. But Trump learned from someone to let all the mockery roll off his back, that the negative publicity was still publicity.”

“A lot of people produce podcasts in which they simply ramble on for hours about themselves and their lives. There is something very poignant about the volume of human desire to be heard out there in the Wild West of podcasts.”