The joke was that President Bush only declared war when Starbucks was hit. You can mess with the U.N. all you want, but when you start interfering with the right to get caffeinated, someone has to pay.

You can't even communicate in English. Real life is not a series of levels.

She says screens are the cigarettes of our age. They're toxic, and we're only going to realize the damage they're doing when it's too late.

I like to go to Starbucks and watch the intellectuals. I observe them and their intellectualness. They in turn observe me drinking coffee and being a creeper.

Pretty quickly, I stopped seeing the company as an engine of community. Instead, I saw it as a mythmaker offering only an illusion of belonging and meeting its customers' desire for connections in form, maybe, but surely not in substance. Once I came to this conclusion, I started to dig deeper into the company's other promises--great working conditions, musical discovery, fair treatment of farmer, and concern for the environment. Every time I went excavating, the stories turned out to be more complex, more heavily edited, and more ambiguous than I had first thought. Each time, it became clear that Starbucks fulfilled its many promises only in the thinnest, most transitory of ways and that people's desires went largely unfulfilled.

In my world there would be as many public libraries as there are Starbucks.