David Simon:

Nobody knows what anyone's building until it's built.

Kurt Eichenwald:

A management system known as "stack ranking" -- a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor -- effectively crippled Microsoft's ability to innovate. "Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed -- every one -- cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees," Eichenwald writes. "If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review," says a former software developer. "It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies."

A.O. Scott:

When hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, it is never a laughing matter.

Adam Davidson:

There must be an easier way to make money. For the cost of "Men in Black 3," for instance, the studio could have become one of the world's largest venture-capital funds, thereby owning a piece of hundreds of promising start-ups. Instead, it purchased the rights to a piece of intellectual property, paid a fortune for a big star and has no definitive idea why its movie didn't make a huge profit. Why is anyone in the film industry?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

In 2007, Mexican authorities raided the home of Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese-Mexican businessman who is believed to have supplied meth-precursor chemicals to the cartel, and discovered $206 million, the largest cash seizure in history. And that was the money Zhenli held onto -- he was an inveterate gambler, who once blew so much cash in Las Vegas that one of the casinos presented him, in consolation, with a Rolls-Royce. "How much money do you have to lose in the casino for them to give you a Rolls-Royce?" Tony Placido, the D.E.A. intelligence official, asked. (The astonishing answer, in Zhenli's case, is $72 million at a single casino in a single year.)

Arlie Russell Hochschild:

The mere existence of a paid wantologist indicates just how far the market has penetrated our intimate lives. Can it be that we are no longer confident to identify even our most ordinary desires without a professional to guide us?

Michael Sacasas:

We buy our books to give shape to our thinking, but it never occurs to us that the manner in which we make our purchases may have a more lasting influence on our character than the contents of the book.