There’s always a Mormon around when you don’t want one, trying your patience with unsolicited kindness.”
~ David Foster Wallace via The Atlantic

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KFI’s John Ziegler is not a journalist — he is an entertainer. Or maybe it’s better to say that he is part of a peculiar, modern, and very popular type of news industry, one that manages to enjoy the authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved. It is a frightening industry, though not for any of the simple reasons most critics give.
~ David Foster Wallace

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The fact of the matter is that it is not John Ziegler’s job to be responsible, or nuanced, or to think about whether his on-air comments are productive or dangerous, or cogent, or even defensible. That is not to say that the host would not defend his “we’re better”—strenuously—or that he does not believe it’s true. It is to say that he has exactly one on-air job, and that is to be stimulating.
~ David Foster Wallace

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Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans.
~ David Foster Wallace

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Rush Limbaugh is the third great progenitor of today’s political talk radio partly because he’s a host of extraordinary, once-in-a-generation talent and charisma—bright, loquacious, witty, complexly authoritative—whose show’s blend of news, entertainment, and partisan analysis became the model for legions of imitators.
~ David Foster Wallace

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The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down.
~ David Foster Wallace

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It is, after all, unlikely that Rush Limbaugh always feels as jaunty and confident as he seems on the air, or that Howard Stern really is deeply fascinated by porn starlets every waking minute of the day. But a host’s persona is not the same as outright acting. For the most part, it’s probably more like the way we are all slightly different with some people than we are with others.
~ David Foster Wallace

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Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.
~ David Foster Wallace

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Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
~ David Foster Wallace

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What the really great artists do is they’re entirely themselves.
~ David Foster Wallace

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