34 Quotes by David Plotz

In the early 1980s, Graham worked hard to turn the Repository into a respectable business, rather than a ludicrous one: Graham's wife didn't like keeping the sperm at the Escondido estate. Not only had the house been picketed, but a Japanese trespasser had once made a run at the sperm, only to be nipped by a family dog.

Changing the way we talk is not political correctness run amok. It reflects an admirable willingness to acknowledge others who once were barely visible to the dominant culture, and to recognize that something that may seem innocent to you may be painful to others.

I’m so grateful to Hugo Lindgren, Jon Kelly, and the people who gave me the opportunity to write a weekly column. It’s an amazing thing to do, and when I started they both said, you know, the problem with columns is they just exist forever.

What is Atlas Obscura? So, it was a small digital media company. It’s an atlas, it’s literally like, an atlas of places, wonderful, unusual places.

I’m going to have a project-based life rather than a job-based life.

When you’re writing for the New York Times someone reading it knows the topic better than you do and knows when you’ve messed up.

My mother – both my mother and father had very successful careers. My mother’s an English professor and my father is a scientist and physician. They worked at the same jobs for their entire life, 50 years each.

I want to have enough space to, I don’t know, think thoughts. I mean, I just – I don’t know that I’m capable of having an exciting, profound thought every week that’s worth a column.

That economics and finance are often covered as technical subjects, sort of boring subjects, and either you already know a lot about it and you follow it, or you don’t know much about it and you don’t want to know.