––What is your qualm with its popularity?

Blum: Texting, like IM-ing, encourages people to think in the type of abbreviations that should only be used by realtors and in newspaper ads—IMHO.  Soon we'll all be communicating in scraps, Y?  And it's annoying—like we needed yet another way for information to bombard us while we're walking down the street or driving or shopping.  Whatever happened to concentrating on one thing at a time, like human beings?

Glass: I have no qualms about yoga as a way of staying supple and physically fit, and I could probably be convinced that authentic Eastern practitioners of yoga do achieve some  higher plane of mental acuity through convoluting their bodies into poses that remind me of the Twister craze back in junior high. Who am I to judge the rituals of another culture? What I find absurd, however, are the legions of modern American women who are suddenly, often aggressively, extolling the inner bliss and wisdom bestowed upon them every time they roll out a foam mat and emulate those poses. (Especially foolish are the ones who also personify our own cultural stereotypes, driving about in their big-butt cars, drinking their free-range chai, sporting their aubergine spandex capris and paisley Tevas.) Among the ersatz epiphanies proliferating everywhere, yoga-as-enlightenment may seem reasonably harmless, but anything that encourages people to mistake a hit of endorphins for an act of virtue looks sinister to me. (Perhaps I shouldn’t single out women, but among the men I know who practice yoga, nobody brags about spiritual gains.) And “hot yoga”? Sounds like an engraved invitation to flesh-eating staphylococci. I know one devotee who thought it had changed her life, and it did. She developed virulent allergies to the building materials in the yoga studio where she attended classes.

Hermann: There is something so creepy to me about a virtual "place" where you create your virtual "personality" which of course is only created by the stuff that you say you like, or the groups you join, or who your "friends" are.  I know I come off as some kind of old-timey crank by ranting about this, but the whole thing seems like too much posturing to me, putting up more pictures of ourselves and saying what we're "doing" at this exact moment and displaying who sent us virtual flowers. People seem to present cutesy versions of their selves, and I don't know how much honesty is involved.  It also seems like Facebook is not actually interesting or worth any time unless you spend A LOT of time doing it, keeping it updated, posting clips and pictures, and then, where does your "real" personality, the more complicated one, end up?

Pearl:  It's a cult, I'm tired of being told I should have one because everyone artistic or creative does, would never use anything else, would leave the room if someone walked in with a PC. Yes, I've tried using my friends' Macs. No, I don't like the interface, I don't think it's better, I think it somehow manages to be condescending. (Plus, no right click button?) And there are no choices in products. But, worse than the computers: Apple Stores. Genius Bar. And the lines people wait on at the convention centers when new apple products are announced. Stop it. Once, I was at the movies in Los Angeles. In the row in front of us, there was a young couple. The woman had an i-Phone and couldn't stop playing with it, the guy just sat there, putting in ear plugs in preparation for the movie. I blamed the i-Phone for their existences.