Alexandra Petri

Harvard is a wondrously tolerant climate for debate and exchange among a wide variety of thoughts, backgrounds, and beliefs, but the voice of religion on campus is largely inaudible.

Although no one explicitly wants a president who could have a reliable fall back career in stand-up comedy, everyone shudders at the thought of a Rutherford B. Hayes or John Kerry.

George W. Bush has dutifully, if not intentionally, provided Americans with laughs for nearly a decade. He has also made them cry, sometimes for the same reason.

Comedy and politics have a lot in common. Both are great ways to pick up chicks - just look at Governor Spitzer. Or Ellen Degeneres. Both require spending time on the road meeting strangers who often have the desire to throw things at you. Both are difficult, if not impossible, to do all alone. And both rely heavily on personality.

It's easier to find the joke in something when you think, 'This - this is ridiculous.'

Dull words are what make many bright sentences shine. They do not call attention to themselves.

Journalists run many risks. It comes with the profession.

As long as I'm writing stuff and people are reading it, I'll be happy.

I think, when you're doing a column and blogging every day, you get familiar with the sound of your own voice.

The biggest way to be productive is if you're procrastinating on another more important project.

I can be serious for an hour; then I have to go lie down.

Harvard pulsates with life and thought of all kinds, and religion should not be left out of its ongoing discussions.

Nearly everything faith-related that I have done at Harvard has been followed by free food, from going to services at Harvard's Episcopal Chaplaincy to attending a day of interfaith discussion and dialogue hosted by the university chaplains in the fall.

Awkward is a state of being.

Harvard is nerd rehab. You have to check yourself in. Those who seek a school filled with self-proclaimed 'nerds,' seek elsewhere. Dropping the H bomb may brand you as an intellectual or a Kennedy. But it will not give you much nerd cred. And that's a good thing.

In society at large, nerds are law-abiding, caring, fundamentally good folk who keep the wheels of civilization grinding.

While MIT and the University of Chicago duke it out for the title of nerdiest school, James Franco and Renee Zellweger show up at Harvard to party. Somehow, miracle of miracles, Harvard is 'cool.'

Stereotyped as convention-going, pocket-protector-wearing, chess-playing, infrequently-showering types, nerds are one of our society's most ridiculed groups. And, for a university with an international reputation as a bastion of intellectualism, Harvard is startlingly devoid of them.

The difference between face-to-face conversation and any other medium of communication is simple: No distractions are permitted.

People talk to pass the time, share information, and entertain each other.

No one has debates on Twitter.

YouTube is covered in comments that would be better expressed - and better spelled - via a simple thumbs-up or down.

Life has its trade-offs. As you age, you lose things like teeth and the ability to play in the ball pit at fast-food restaurants, and you gain things like experience and employer-based health insurance.

The problem with technology, as with fashion, is that it's impossible to be 'in' forever.

No generation has escaped it - one morning, your skill with the eight-track or the record player or the cotton gin suddenly ceases to impress. It's just one of those inevitable disappointments that come with growing up, like the realization that Santa doesn't exist or the way that music always takes a turn for the worse after you turn 30.

By isolating ourselves from those with whose opinions we disagree, we lose the ability to defend our beliefs.

Everyone praises Harvard 'for the students.' But what makes Harvard's students so great is that they are, in many ways, a cross-section of the larger world. They are normal people who happen to be excellent, and this sets them apart. People who go to Yale go because they want to attend Yale. People who go to Harvard go because they can.

Yale students want to impress you with what they're doing. Harvard students want to impress you with how cool they look while doing it.

Any promising young white man rich enough to theoretically afford a giant oil painting of himself gets to remain young and innocent forever, and none of his actions have any consequences, whether there is magic involved or not.

Bills ought to be passed with deliberation by committees. Change should be achieved in a bipartisan manner. Incrementally, day by day, we should reach a consensus - not perfect, by any means - but something that we can be proud of, nonetheless.

A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but I think if the picture is made in MS Paint, the going rate might be slightly less.

MS Paint was my creative outlet for many years.

You can be brilliant in some ways and despicable in others. You can be a clean, upright, moral individual in your private life who never swears, treats women with respect, and speaks highly of duty and honor - and go out every day and dedicate yourself to a cause that makes the world worse.

History contains heroes, but no one is a hero entirely, and no one is a hero for very long.

I am a millennial. Destruction is all I know. I no longer care what I wipe from the face of the Earth.

At Harvard, where students tend to respond to real-world celebrities with the vague sense that they could do a better job themselves, the recipe for celebrity is complex.

Hi, my name is Alexandra, and I'm a netaholic.

Books are wonderful. They are like people, except they mind less when you put them down and wander off to eat something.

Harvard prides itself on its diversity - economic, racial, social, geographical - but it remains intellectually segregated. It's not what conservative commentators seem to imagine - a bastion of liberal professors force-feeding radical opinions to a naive student body.

Obama isn't funny.

All the young voters who flocked to Obama in droves grew up watching 'The Daily Show' and the 'Colbert Report.'

George Washington didn't have to make us laugh; he just had to establish precedents and avoid chopping down more cherry trees than he could possibly help. But somewhere along the line, Americans began expecting their presidents to do more than just govern. They also had to make us laugh.

Some information is important, and some is not, and intelligence consists in knowing one from the other.

Thanks to postmodernism, we tend to see all facts as meaningless trivia, no one more vital than any other. Yet this disregard for facts qua facts is intellectually crippling. Facts are the raw material of thought, and the knowledge of significant facts makes sophisticated thought possible.

It turns out that in order to think well, knowledge helps.

As long as cantankerous old people have existed, they have complained that kids nowadays don't seem to know anything.

If awkward has an antithesis, it is probably Barack Obama.

Serious beliefs are awkward, especially religious ones. It's not that there's anything wrong with them, it's just that people's real, heart-felt, deeply held beliefs are, well, 'not easy to handle or deal with, requiring great skill, ingenuity, or care' - in a word, awkward.

In general, sincerity is awkward.

One of the things I try to do - and I always regret when I'm not doing it - is I try to read as much as possible as I'm consuming news.