Tom Junod

“Of course, Google specializes in coming up with ideas, professes the highest ideals, and is dedicated to solving the world's problems.”

“Josh Ozersky was a meat man. He knew meat, revered it, studied it, sang it, evangelized it, wrote about it, and, of course, ate it. Lots of it. Life, for Josh, was meat, and writing. Everything else was a side.”

“The pit bull is not a breed but a conglomeration of traits, and those traits are reshaping what we think of as the American dog, which is to say the American mutt.”

“Every artist can make art only from the materials at hand, and many of the child stars who try to mature into artists can make art only from their knowledge - and ours - that they were child stars.”

“I love many of the rock and rollers next up on altar of actuarial sacrifice more than I ever loved David Bowie.”

“I am an adoptive parent. My wife and I adopted our daughter nine years ago. She was born in China. We have been her parents since she was nine and a half months old, and we don't know very much about her life before we first took her into our arms.”

“Weddings have become an expression not just of our desires but also our ambitions, and so more and more the food at weddings is like the food everywhere else, with the ingredients parsed for purity and the preparation praised for ingenuity and the sushi chef standing where the carving table used to be.”

“I met fred rogers in 1998, when 'Esquire' assigned me a story about him for a special issue on American heroes. I last spoke with him on Christmas Day 2002, when I called him to talk about an argument I'd had with my cousin; he died two months later, on February 27, 2003.”

“Any child can tell you what Google does - Google gives you the answers. But Google doesn't, not really.”

“His name was Fred Rogers. He came home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, once upon a time, and his parents, because they were wealthy, had bought something new for the corner room of their big redbrick house. It was a television.”

“By turning our culture over to the spectacle of child stars and their growing pains, we simply wind up taking their childishness seriously and ensuring that they don't grow up at all. And neither do we.”

“I cook so that there is no absence. I cook so that I am always there, even when I'm gone, even when I die, and my cooking translates in my daughter's memory as, simply, this: time.”

“Storytellers all, we humans might run out of time even as we triumph over the problem of running out of space. But we will never run out of stories.”

“We can trust technology to effect change - that's a given.”

“I'm a suit guy. I like wearing them for the sense of completion they offer. I like buying them for the sense of near permanence - the knowledge that whatever I buy will be part of my life for the next ten years or so.”

“It is insufficient to say that my experience as a bully haunts me. Rather, my experience as a bully has been fundamental to the creation of my conscience, because it is what prevents me from making the basic human claim that I am a good person.”

“Wearing a suit can seem like a somewhat archaic gesture, a concession to formality in a determinedly casual age.”

“But I'm not an Atlanta Falcons fan. Nobody is. Sure, the team has its followers, its adherents, in Atlanta. But they don't follow the team the way fans from other teams follow their teams - the way, say, fans of the New Orleans Saints follow the Saints.”

“You don't have to love cooking to cook, but you have to do more than love baking to bake. You have to bake out of love.”

“Once upon a time, there was a boy who didn't like himself very much. It was not his fault. He was born with cerebral palsy. Cerebral palsy is something that happens to the brain. It means that you can think but sometimes can't walk, or even talk.”