assuming the mistake

The drama of being a loser in the sex selection sweepstakes reveals a confounding irony that is at the center of Houellebecq’s work. You might have been abandoned by your mother (as most of his characters are), indifferently raised, humiliated by your peers; you might be temperamentally aggressive and hostile and feel very little kinship with or interest in most people you meet; you might find true contentment only when you’re alone. In short, you might be thoroughly unsuited for human society. But this will in no way relieve you of the need for other people. You will suffer unbearably from your loneliness, and you will not have any way to fix it.

Cultural criticism on the internet is dying because we finally realized that the voices behind blogs, twitter feeds, and authentic writing outlets are as fat, bored, uninspired, and jealous as the fat, bored, uninspired, and jealous voices that we thought we had escaped from.

Skrillex’s work, in particular, is a lot more of a pile-up, as if someone’s picked all the most obviously, superficially cool and high-impact parts of a dozen different genres, dredged them in stimulants, and started mashing them against one another—the same way Quentin Tarantino can rifle through a dozen film genres and borrow all the best fight scenes. There’s Daft Punk’s insistent pop-dance; the blocky neon blips of electro; the melodic buzz of old video games; the gushy, sentimental melodies of trance; the high-speed skip and glitch of Aphex Twin; the glammy pop feel of L.A. party music—all things that are easy to like. And when you mush them all together into one clanging, high-octane stew, they become extremely easy to like, whether or not the listener has ever known or cared about electronic music before. Not elegant, deep, or moving, but very easy to get a thrill out of.

ROUTINE IS A NARCOTIC AND THAT’S WHY WE CAN’T GET PIZZA EVERY NIGHT

I never thought I would discover a Black nerd community. I knew there were individuals who felt like I did, but I didn’t know we all were lonely and isolated, faking the funk, as it were.

21st-century blackness has lost its rigid center, and irony permeates the cultural membrane. More than kids knowing they can be president of the United States, it might be more crucial to the expansion of black identity that — thanks to, say, N.E.R.D or Odd Future — they know they can be skate punks.

Portlandia” is an extended joke about what Freud called the narcissism of small differences: the need to distinguish oneself by minute shadings and to insist, with outsized militancy, on the importance of those shadings.

i me you we he she ate a yum yum grubemups smorgasbording its like breathing take a man out of fish you can fish we all are fish where’s that fish the man looks at us like fish through his crystal window and we we we we we weeeeeeee (!) look back

Today I make my stand. Here goes: The eyes of anthropomorphized cars are the headlights, not the windshield.

Suddenly, one day some little fat girl in Ohio is gonna be the new Mozart…and make a beautiful film with her father’s little camera-corder, and for once this whole professionalism about movies will be destroyed, forever, and it will really become an art form.