Joyce Wadler:

Instead of using phrases like "clean up this mess," "restore order" or anything that involves the words "barn" or "sty," you might say, "Hey, kids, how about I remove this wrapping paper and we build a cool Mies van der Rohe skyscraper with your new Legos?"

Philip Gourevitch:

The scenes of suffering that we tend to call humanitarian crises are almost always symptoms of political circumstances, and there's no apolitical way of responding to them -- no way to act without having a political effect. Moving from mess to mess, the aid workers in their white Land Cruisers manage to take credit without accepting blame, as though humanitarianism were its own alibi.

Monster Supply Store:

With spine-shuddering pleasure we hereby announce the grand reopening of Hoxton Street Monster Supplies. After extensive refurbishment, we now stock a pharmacopoeia of different types of fear, a complete range of edible human preserves and everyday household essentials like Fang Floss and Zombie Mints. So we invite clients old and new, living and dead to come and discover why we've been the store of choice for discerning monsters for over two hundred years, and will be the same forevermore.

Kalpish Ratna:

It's not just the Nepalis who shit in the water in Haiti. Everybody does. The 1.3 million homeless send their excrement scudding into the water.

Haiti, with its vast displaced population and its misery of want and despair, was cholera waiting to happen, ever since the magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake of Tuesday, 12 January 2010.

One money manager, on Goldman Sachs:

Of course we do business with them. We have to. It's like the Mob who picks up the garbage. You pay their fees, because you need your garbage picked up.

Chuck Klosterman:

A lot of modern life is exactly like slaughtering zombies. The Internet reminds of us this every day.

This is the zombies' world, and we just live in it. But we can live better.