Rabih Alameddine

All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague.

If you want to go out for a hunting trip and shoot cans with your son and a .22, that's fine. Do I need an AK-47 with a 100-round magazine if I'm going on a hunting trip? No. It is, to borrow a phrase from Confucius, like using a cannon to kill a mosquito.

As a kid, I always idolized entrepreneurs. I thought they were cool people in the way that I thought basketball players were cool people. It's cool that some people get paid to dunk basketballs, but I'm not one of those people.