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The word “scold” — to pelt somebody with criticism — came from the skalds, a group of Icelandic and Scandinavian poets who lounged around Viking courts composing snarky epic poems.

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Our founders were not in favor of a woman’s right to vote or a black man’s equal protection of the law, so when it comes to equality, why do we care what they thought about guns?

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Know this, my baby-faced brothers — your inner beard is not going to reveal itself to a quitter, to a man who relents from his quest for facial hair after just days or weeks.

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Reeves’ lack of care for his own money extends as far as giving $80 million of his Matrix salary away to the special-effects team and costume designers who worked on the trilogy, as he believes they are the ones who deserve all the credit. According to Reeves, “Money is the last thing I think about. I could live on what I’ve already made for the next few centuries.

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News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon makes us passive. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised, sarcastic and fatalistic.

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Nobody cares about content. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, hey, I should read some content today.

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The point here is that corporate power regularly transcends national sovereignty. We have to face the fact that the democratic institutions we worked so hard to shore up during the 20th century are no longer sufficient to protect us in this brave new world.

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We’re way beyond mocking “don’t be evil.” Now our default position toward Google increasingly resembles how we treated Microsoft in the ’90s. Google is indispensable, certainly, but not necessarily to be trusted.

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Here’s a message: stop talking about your rights and take up your responsibilities. Gun owners should be first in line to pass laws to require every gun owner to be fully responsible for the use or misuse of his or her firearm at all times. When you do that, I will respect you as a fellow citizen. Until then, you are simply a threat to my children.

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I always figured that if Gretzky was any Turtles character, it would be Krang, riding around in a giant exoskeleton that looked suspiciously like Marty McSorley.

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Next people will start wondering why the names in the U.S. News rankings change so little from decade to decade. Or why the American population gets bigger and bigger, but our richest universities admit the same size classes every year, Or why in a country of 300 million people and countless universities, we can’t seem to elect a president or nominate a Supreme Court justice who doesn’t have a Harvard or Yale degree.