Dave Pell > Quotes

“History would always be bigger than the present.”
― Dave Pell, Please Scream Inside Your Heart: Breaking News and Nervous Breakdowns in the Year that Wouldn't End

“The findings of a decade-long study published in the Journal of Gerontology found that in the US and UK, being wealthy added nine years of life expectancy, and not just any life expectancy, healthy life expectancy. Bottom line: it turns out being broke is the most dangerous medical precondition.”
― Dave Pell, Please Scream Inside Your Heart: Breaking News and Nervous Breakdowns in the Year that Wouldn't End

“Let them eat accurately labelled cake.”
― Dave Pell

“I attended a bat mitzvah during which the presiding rabbi had the unenviable task of leading what should be a joyous event during a time of deep mourning. During the ceremony, she described a Jewish teaching that explains if a funeral procession and a wedding procession meet at an intersection and one has to go first, the wedding takes the lead. This Talmudic lesson is meant to demonstrate that even in times of extreme sadness and mourning, we need to make room for life and joy.”
― Dave Pell

“Real news can be costly. Fake news is free.”
― Dave Pell, Please Scream Inside Your Heart: Breaking News and Nervous Breakdowns in the Year that Wouldn't End

“While it’s not difficult to understand why journalists would race to break a story first, it’s harder to explain why news consumers felt the need to become faux reporters and immediately deliver the latest news about a member of Congress whose name most didn’t know ten minutes earlier. What drives so many of us to become human breaking-news outlets, providing second-by-second details of a story along with simultaneous analysis? What possessed thousands of my fellow human news hunter-gatherers to breathlessly feed the machine before law enforcement officials on the ground even had a chance to put together a preliminary outline of what exactly happened? If I had the answer, I would have tweeted it by now.”
― Dave Pell, Please Scream Inside Your Heart: Breaking News and Nervous Breakdowns in the Year that Wouldn't End

“Even the worst news story isn't as emotionally formidable as a real feeling related to your actual experiences”
― Dave Pell, Please Scream Inside Your Heart: Breaking News and Nervous Breakdowns in the Year that Wouldn't End

“The early-promise internet gave birth to a problem child. Adam really did raise a Cain.”
― Dave Pell, Please Scream Inside Your Heart: Breaking News and Nervous Breakdowns in the Year that Wouldn't End

“Today, the job of being a politician feels like a fallback option for someone who can't make it as an internet troll.”
― Dave Pell

“As always, the bigger tech issue was that too few companies had way too much power over our democracy. We meant to build a distributed network where everyone would have a voice, and we ended up building centralized mega-platforms with CEOs who have the power of God.”
― Dave Pell

“Each morning, I open more than fifty browser tabs and look for the day's most fascinating news. I then write up a series of blurbs describing the top ten stories and share links to the full articles. There's no secret algorithm. I am the algorithm.”
― Dave Pell, Please Scream Inside Your Heart: Breaking News and Nervous Breakdowns in the Year that Wouldn't End

“Before the Australian fires were done, the flames would burn 72,000 square miles, destroy nearly 6,000 buildings, and kill at least 34 people. The toll on animals was even more dramatic, with an estimated one billion deaths. There would be at least one bush fire in Australia for 240 straight days.”
― Dave Pell, Please Scream Inside Your Heart: Breaking News and Nervous Breakdowns in the Year that Wouldn't End