Tom Junod

“A mob pelting pilloried wrongdoers with rotten vegetables would seem to have little in common with one doing the same with 140-character invective, except of course the most important thing: the belief that they are in the right, and are even doing good by making the object of their contempt feel really, really bad.”

“I did not get into a fistfight with my father at my sister's wedding. My sister didn't have a wedding.”

“A lot of people like to say that they have trouble getting gifts. I have trouble giving them. It's not out of a lack of generosity, mind you. My fallback is to go big, no matter what the occasion.”

“And you understand something: that although, like all American eaters, you've been conditioned to think of the entree as the climax of the meal, it never is. It is, indeed, almost always disappointing, especially if you order fish.”

“The fact is, you can't have Southern friends without eventually wanting to sing with them, and without eventually learning that the only way to sing with them is to make your peace with country music.”

“Without your data, Google couldn't pursue the dream of trying to figure out what you're really thinking when you're asking a question, of trying to discern, from the imprecision of your language, the exact answer you're looking for.”

“The main difference between listening to music on a computer and listening to music on vinyl or disc is not sound quality or even portability; it's that when you listen to music on a computer, you listen to music on the same instrument you use to acquire it.”

“Most people are hungry, therefore they eat. I am hungry, therefore I cook. Since my senior year in college, when I moved into an apartment with a bunch of friends, I have cooked almost every day of my life.”

“Music subscriptions will eventually replace music collections because the digital universe is oriented against the idea of ownership - because music ownership is itself the eight-track of the Internet.”

“Character actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman and James Gandolfini have found themselves getting more and more leading roles because they are permitted to behave onscreen in ways that George Clooney and Matt Damon never could.”

“I always looked askance at Pandora and Spotify, regarding both as a passive means of experiencing music; they feed you music they presume you will like, and eventually you like it.”

“There are no foodies at funerals.”

“My ten-year-old daughter loves gifts. She loves to give them and she loves to get them. She loves to give them when she's hurt her parents' feelings, and she loves to get them when her parents have hurt hers.”

“There are only three questions that matter in the kitchen if you're cooking and not baking. The first is how good are your ingredients; the second is how much salt to add; and the third is how long to cook whatever it is you're cooking - the question of doneness.”

“I forget what I wore for my first encounter with Mark Zuckerberg. I know it wasn't a suit - that would have seemed out of place in the rigorously casual world of Facebook. I probably wore what I usually wear, a pair of jeans and a Gap T-shirt, maybe my black sneakers.”

“I don't play guitar. I sing. I'm the lead singer, of Cousin Billy. I also play harmonica, after a fashion.”

“Between 1965 and 1980, my mother, Frances Junod, served cutlets of pale flesh - mostly veal and chicken, though sometimes pork - to my father, my brother and sister, and me at least twice a week.”

“We live in the golden age of character actors - in an age when actors who have done their time in character roles are frequently asked to carry dark movies and complicated television dramas.”

“We love football because the game of football is better than it has ever been, and is somehow managing to attain, at the same time, an apogee of opprobrium and excellence.”

“We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them.”