- To say you can simply shrug off differences about medical fact as outrageousness or controversy is to feed the belief that science in general, be it about vaccines or climate change or evolution, is subjective: you have your truth and I have mine. But it isn't. The earth didn't revolve around the sun only for Galileo. The problem with treating factual matters of science like opinion debates is that, as soon as you do that, antiscience has already won.
- On February 10 [2015] we learned that one of the most respected voices in the media would be leaving his anchor desk, as would one one of TV's biggest celebrities known for jokes and fake news. That it is not immediately apparent which part of that sentence refers to Jon Stewart and which to Brian Williams tells you all you need to know about status, authority and trust in the media today.
- Revolutions do not generally start at bedtime. Who has the energy? Bedtime is for unwinding, taking stock, being told a story. But push too far past bedtime - get punchy and get wired - and things change, reality distorts, rules get broken. Admittedly, staying up to watch a late-night show does not feel like an insurrectionist act. But in the 1980s era of Late Night with David Letterman, crowding around the common-room TV with my college dorm mates, we had the sense that something amazingly wrong was happening. Late Night was like something that had snuck onto TV, an anomaly that you'd better watch quick before someone had noticed and fired the disgruntled control-room staffer who switched it on.
- [on dealing with today's plethora of good television programming] To enjoy any of it you must acknowledge that you will never be able to enjoy all of it. Even a videophile sometimes needs to say a little prayer: God, grant me the serenity to accept the TV I can't see, the wisdom to know the TV I must see, and the courage to change the channel.
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