Category: Best Line of the Day

Clever turns of phrase, special splashes of wit, provocative insight — all in a sentence or two.

Best line of the day, so far

“Short with big ears.”

Annotation on an admissions form for Harvard, circa 1960s, as reported by Malcolm Gladwell in his excellent New Yorker piece on Ivy League admissions.

Social scientists distinguish between what are known as treatment effects and selection effects. The Marine Corps, for instance, is largely a treatment-effect institution. It doesn’t have an enormous admissions office grading applicants along four separate dimensions of toughness and intelligence. It’s confident that the experience of undergoing Marine Corps basic training will turn you into a formidable soldier. A modelling agency, by contrast, is a selection-effect institution. You don’t become beautiful by signing up with an agency. You get signed up by an agency because you’re beautiful.

At the heart of the American obsession with the Ivy League is the belief that schools like Harvard provide the social and intellectual equivalent of Marine Corps basic training—that being taught by all those brilliant professors and meeting all those other motivated students and getting a degree with that powerful name on it will confer advantages that no local state university can provide. …

The extraordinary emphasis the Ivy League places on admissions policies, though, makes it seem more like a modelling agency than like the Marine Corps, …

Best line of the day, so far

“This isn’t 1989, when the mainstream media was stuck with a couple of things it no longer has: comparatively archaic channels of distribution, and a dose of self-respect.”

Salon’s Ask the pilot (Patrick Smith) discussing the JetBlue emergency landing September 21. He says it was no big deal.

… as time went by the airline faced an interesting quandary: leave the TVs running, and sensational commentary was liable to scare the shit out of everyone on the plane; pull the plug, and people would quickly suspect the situation was more dire than the crew was letting on. The whole thing set up a weird voyeuristic triangle: The passengers believed they were watching themselves, when actually they were watching the rest of us watch them.

Good stuff, worth a click, as is this week’s column on outsourcing aircraft repair. Note: Salon requires a subscription or viewing a brief ad.

Best lines of the day, so far

“President Bush, apparently stung by criticism that he had installed political cronies of spotty experience into critical positions in FEMA, turned to a political crony of spotty experience to fill the open seat on the Supreme Court.”

— FunctionalAmbivalent

“The president carefully and deliberately selected as his nominee for the vacant Supreme Court position the first person he ran into in the hallway this morning.”

— Achenblog

Best line of the day, so far

“The way news is driven today is not through print,” [Jon] Stewart said. “I don’t consider print media as relevant.” When [Graydon] Carter argued that television news consistently siphons what first appears in print, as evidenced by its coverage of the 2004 presidential campaign, Stewart said: “I didn’t say you weren’t important; I said you’re at the children’s table.”

Jon Stewart as reported by Folio Magazine

Even better best line of the day

“Perhaps Bush will decide that the best way he can be president is by being a governor, of sorts. He can get to know the local pols, corporate execs, entrepreneurs, neighborhood leaders, the textures of the Gulf communities. Put on a hard hat. Aides will want to know where he went and they’ll be told, “He’s driving the forklift again.” The forklift with the presidential seal. Forklift One.”

— Joel Achenbach

(Even three quotes from Achenbach leaves much there for you to go read for yourself. It’s priceless.)