Angry Robot

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

If they think they’re going to get all of this planning and analysis done plus building by 2027, they really must be on cannabis or something.

Laying the responsibility of climate change at the feet of individual people by telling them to tinker around the margins of their own actions is like telling someone to stop a reckless driver by turning down the radio or turning up the air conditioning.

“The Bible says, ‘If you do this to the least of these, you do it to me,’ ” Sheila said, quoting Jesus. “But the least of these are Americans, not the ones crossing the border.”

Who gives a damn about the past? I live for today, plan for the future, pack a lunch and haul ass

Torontonians like to sound off on Americans’ inability to deal with guns and gun deaths. But Toronto’ s inability to deal with the car creates its own killing fields.

The SARS crisis took 44 lives in Canada. Ninety-three pedestrians or cyclists have died on the streets of Toronto since Vision Zero was implemented two years ago. The time for half-measures is over — and the half measures are not working, anyway.

Courage is not about the absence of fear or anger or extreme emotion. The definition of courage is, when experiencing those emotions, refusing to let them govern your behaviour. Staying true to yourself and your values, doing what you know is right, and necessary, despite the heightened emotion. Courage is finding it in yourself to rise to an occasion rather than being diminished by it.

There is no strategy to Trump’s Twitter feed; he is not trying to distract the media. He is being distracted. He darts with quark-like speed from topic to topic in his tweets because that’s how cable news works.

If you think 2017 was bad, imagine an America without allies fighting another two-front war, this one involving nuclear weapons, under the leadership of the most hated president in modern history, while a torture apologist runs the C.I.A. The world right now is a powder keg. Trump, an untethered maniac, sits atop it, flicking a lighter that Republicans in Congress could take away, but won’t. If everything goes up in flames, we can’t say we weren’t warned.

One of the problems with climate change is getting people to realise it was anthropogenic – created by people. It’s the same problem with social networks – they are manmade. If they are not serving humanity, they can and should be changed.

Pro tip: if everyone you admire keeps disappointing you with awful sex scandals, try admiring more women.

Being happy is the most subversive thing a woman can be.

The best way to end oppression is to very politely ask oppressors to please stop oppressing you. Also, consider getting them a gift certificate for The Cheesecake Factory. Oppressors love The Cheesecake Factory.

A good movie is three good scenes and no bad scenes.

I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me 80 million times, I need to seriously consider what the fuck is wrong with me.

When I was ten I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

Goodnight, sweet wince.

You cannot write payoff-based TV anymore because the audience is essentially a render farm. They have an unlimited calculation capacity. There’s no writers’ room that can think more than 20 million people who can think about it for an hour a day.

Death when it comes will have no sheep.

There is, for me, a sort of porcupine defensiveness, with the tender meat of love underneath it, that goes up when I am asked to talk about my childhood.

A question few are asking is whether the tools of mass surveillance and social control we spent the last decade building could have had anything to do with the debacle of the 2017 election, or whether destroying local journalism and making national journalism so dependent on [the tech industry’s] platforms was, in retrospect, a good idea.

Even if somebody can give you a reasonable-sounding explanation [for his or her actions], it probably is incomplete, and the same could very well be true for AI. It might just be part of the nature of intelligence that only part of it is exposed to rational explanation. Some of it is just instinctual, or subconscious, or inscrutable.

My job is basically like running a record label, except this record label also happens to sell chicken.