"Yet it’s hard not to feel that he’s making the same mistake that so many Trump voters did regarding wealth and entitlement — namely, confusing money for virtue and accomplishment — and the luck of birth for talent. If so, this might account for Mr. Kushner’s apparent confidence that he can act in whatever manner he sees fit."

"The idea that the Trump administration would condition its response to the pandemic based on its perception of who was bearing the brunt of it was a fevered symptom of a different affliction, Trump Derangement Syndrome. Subsequent reports vindicated my conclusions. In July, The Washington Post reported that desperate White House advisers had begun presenting Trump with maps and data showing spikes in coronavirus cases "among our people' in Republican states," as a way to convince the president to take the pandemic more seriously. That same month, Vanity Fair reported that advisers close to Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, believed that "because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically." Nonpolitical concerns, such as keeping people alive, were of negligible importance by comparison."

"The President wanted to make sure that we had the people doing the best jobs, and making sure that we had the right people focused on all the things that needed to happen to make sure that we can deliver in these unusual times for the American people."

"When the Vice President first asked me to help on the task force with different tasks, I asked the President what he expected from the task force and how I can best serve him and the task force. What the President asked is that all of the recommendations that we make be based on data. He wanted us to be very rigorous, to make sure that we were studying the data, collecting data. A lot of things in this country were happening very quickly, and we wanted to make sure that we were trying to keep updating our models and making sure that we were making informed decisions and informed recommendations to him based on the data that we were able to collect and put together."

"The President also instructed me to make sure that I break down every barrier needed to make sure that the teams can succeed. This is an effort where the government is doing things that the government doesn’t normally do, where we are stretching, we’re acting very quickly. And the President wants to make sure that the is fully behind the different people running the different lines of effort to make sure that we get everything done in a speed that the President demands."

"The President also wanted us to make sure we think outside the box, make sure we’re finding all the best thinkers in the country, making sure we’re getting all the best ideas, and that we’re doing everything possible to make sure that we can keep Americans safe, and make sure we bring a quick end to this in the best way possible, and balance all the different aspects that need to be thought of while we do this. This truly is a historic challenge. We have not seen something like this in a very, very long time. But I am very confident that, by bringing innovative solutions to these hard problems, we will make progress."

"The President has been very, very hands on in this. He’s really instructed us to leave no stone unturned. Just this morning — very early this morning — I got a call from the President. He told me he was hearing from friends of his in New York that the New York public hospital system was running low on critical supply. He instructed me this morning. I called Dr. Katz, who runs the system, asked him which supply was the most supply he was nervous about. He told me it was the N95 masks. I asked what his daily burn was. And I basically got that number, called up Admiral Polowczyk, made sure we had the inventory. We went to the President today, and earlier today,the President called Mayor de Blasio to inform him that we were going to send a month of supply to the New York public hospital system, to make sure that the workers on the frontline can rest assured that they have the N95 masks that they need to get through the next month. We’ll be doing similar things with all the different public hospitals that are in the hotspot zones and making sure that we’re constantly in communications with the local communities."

"Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of his other endeavors — his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians — have been failures. Undeterred, he has now arrogated to himself a major role in fighting the epochal health crisis that’s brought America to its knees."

"Although sexual selection arguments are extremely popular, there is another, more plausible explanation for why enlarged breasts evolved. As I will argue, females with visible breast enlargement would have been better able to support themselves and their infants in the environment in which our early human ancestors lived. Indeed, I suggest that the more robust notion of natural selection is the key to understanding why women have breasts, not the problematic idea of sexual selection."

"Whatever the exact selective advantage of fat, it is clear that the evolution of permanent breast enlargement in human females need not be explained through their erotic appeal to men. What my colleagues and I hoped to show by presenting our explanation is that a reasonable argument based on natural selection could be developed. Our model is not as “sexy” as the explanations that see breasts exclusively as erotic attractors of men. But it avoids relying on such poorly substantiated concepts as differential parental investment, female dependency, and sexual selection, ideas that may reinforce twenty-first century notions about women and gender roles but have little, if no, empirical evidence to support them. The idea that female breasts are little more than objects of sexual attraction for men is a popular one in many European societies, and certainly in the United States, among not only producers and audiences of slick programs on “The Learning Channel,” but also quite obviously among many scientists. But, it seems, they may be indulging more in sexual fantasy than scientific fact."

"Perhaps we should not be surprised by such statistics: after all, men seem to have an overwhelming attraction to breasts. Isn’t a woman’s wish for an enhanced bust line just a natural response to a primal desire to attract a mate? Many contemporary thinkers would suggest that this is the case. They invoke the notion of sexual selection in their arguments, arguing that some time long, long ago in the human evolutionary past, some males became erotically aroused by females with visibly enlarged breasts, choosing them more often as sex partners than their “flat-chested” sisters, thus maintaining this trait in human populations. Some writers even argue that men’s attraction to breasts was a key to the survival of early humans. Given the putative significance of breasts to the human species, is it any wonder that women in the twenty-first century spend millions of dollars, and take medical risks, to enhance theirs?"

"Dissatisfied with their breasts, women in the United States have spent millions of dollars on creams, lotions, devices, and techniques for breast enlargement in the last few decades. [...] Despite the health risks the procedure poses and its considerable expense."

"It’s better to get the last laugh than the joke."

"It’s easier to solve problems if you don’t have to live with the solutions."

"Two wrongs don’t make a right, but three lefts do."

"In a land of plenty it is better to consume than create."

"I could kill two birds if I wasn't so stoned."

"You may know you’re going to die, but you won’t know you’re dead."

"I was reincarnated as my former self."

"The few think for the many."

"I have an undeveloped photographic memory."

"In fraud we trust."

"In the future everyone will be dead for 15 minutes."

"Question, believe, or lose your mind."

"You are not a clone."

"Doing is thinking in the third dimension."

"A full house beats one of a kind."

"He who laughs last may be the joke."

"Life is fair. Everyone gets more than they deserve."

"He who laughs last didn’t get the joke."

"We are the new they."

"My reflections always get it backwards."

"Death would be better if it weren’t forever."

"Don't let your actions betray your intentions."

"I would talk to myself but I’m not a good listener."

"Memories forever remake the past."

"A gun in the hand is worth a corpse in the Promised Land."

"Mad to the marrow."

"If it’s good enough for the cosmos, it’s good enough for humankind."

"It’s not the journey that weighs you down; it’s the baggage."

"Anything worth doing can be done by someone else."

"Talent is the enemy of taste. Taste is the enemy of talent."

"You don’t protest air pollution by holding your breath."

"I’m in love with your pretense like you’re in love with mine."

"Sometimes you have to do something dangerous to get death's attention."

"Animals are never naked."

"The longest journey ends where apathy begins."

"An army of one answers to none."

"You’re only young forever."

"There’s nothing to dream about in heaven."