everything in the sky

“Brin sees his smartphone as “emasculating” not just because he has to stand still and touch it, and not just because “even girls” could use it, but also because his smartphone no longer signifies him as a member of the power elite. Conceptualizations of masculinity are inextricable from conceptualizations of power, and Brin’s privileged status comes to him from social class and professional identity as much as from gender. Cell phones were symbols of masculine power when only wealthy businessmen had them, but now that literally billions of people own them, the cell phone’s ability to signify status has given three beeps and vanished like a dropped call.”

“I want to jump up on the table and scream, “Do you know how lucky we are to be doing this? Do you understand that the only way to repay that karmic debt is to make something good, is to make something ambitious, something beautiful, something memorable?” But I didn’t do that. I just sat there, and I smiled.”

“Braff had the brass to venerate his generation without an ounce of critique, and fetishize himself in the process: He’ll always be, first and foremost, the man who had Natalie Portman, playing an epileptic pixie next door, harvesting his hard-won tears in Dixie Cups. No pardon awaits him on the other side of the Cultural Styx.”