Teju Cole:

It is necessary to understand that free speech and other expressions of liberté are already in crisis in Western societies; the crisis was not precipitated by three deranged gunmen.

We may not be able to attend to each outrage in every corner of the world, but we should at least pause to consider how it is that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent deaths are more meaningful, and more worthy of commemoration, than others.

ADM Mike Rogers:

The entire world is watching how we as a nation are going to respond to this.

Jean-Charles Brisard, head of the French Center for Analysis of Terrorism:

It's a problem of resources.

James A. Lewis:

The real issue is lack of trust in the government.

Mike Loukides:

In the future, we will be increasingly reliant on systems that we can't necessarily trust to do our bidding, and that fail in nondeterministic ways.

David Foster Wallace:

What if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don't even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?

Dr. Laura Elizabeth Pinto and Dr. Selena Nemorin:

The purpose of this article is to explore theoretical and conceptual concerns about the popularity and widespread educational use of The Elf on the Shelf in light of the contemporary literature on play and panoptic surveillance.

Peter Gray:

One game of their own devising was modeled after the camp's daily roll call and was called klepsi-klepsi, a common term for stealing. One playmate was blindfolded; then one of the others would step forward and hit him hard on the face; and then, with blindfold removed, the one who had been hit had to guess, from facial expressions or other evidence, who had hit him. To survive at Auschwitz, one had to be an expert at bluffing -- for example, about stealing bread or about knowing of someone's escape or resistance plans. Klepsi-klepsi may have been practice for that skill.

Robert Pogue Harrison:

In his Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul wrote of the malaise of the earth: "the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time." That creaturely groaning has gotten a lot louder of late, and if God indeed loves his creatures enough to open heaven to them, it is highly likely that, when our pets get there, they will find themselves on their own.

Sjon:

Maybe we lost something when we started classifying nature by the difference between things rather than what we have in common.