Matthew Bloch, Amanda Cox, Jo Craven McGinty and Kevin Quealy:

Examine Netflix rental patterns, neighborhood by neighborhood, in a dozen cities.

David Runciman:

The things Bill Clinton loves are politics, hard data and his family, in roughly that order.

Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira:

Follow the data.

Whit Diffie and Susan Landau:

We are moving from a world with a billion people connected to the Internet to one in which 10 or 100 times that many devices will be connected as well. Particularly in aggregation, the information reported by these devices will blanket the world with a network whose gaze is difficult to evade.

Louis Menand:

People are prurient, and they like to lap up the gossip. People also enjoy judging other people's lives. They enjoy it excessively. It's not one of the species' more attractive addictions ...

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Flynn23:

It is because our own lives have become so bankrupt that we seek the stories of others.

Teresa DiFalco:

Minor drama is the lifeblood of suburbs.

Vladimir Nabokov:

We both, Vasili Ivanovich and I, have always been impressed by the anonymity of all the parts of a landscape, so dangerous for the soul, the impossibility of ever finding out where that path you see leads -- and look, what a tempting thicket! It happened that on a distant slope or in a gap in the trees there would appear and, as it were, stop for an instant, like air retained in the lungs, a spot so enchanting -- a lawn, a terrace -- such perfect expression of tender, well-meaning beauty -- that it seemed that if one could stop the train and go thither, forever, to you, my love ... But a thousand beech trunks were already madly leaping by, whirling in a sizzling sun pool, and again the chance for happiness was gone.

Virginie Tisseau:

I ride the tram because every day it takes me to a place less familiar.

Decius:

Noticing is easier in a foreign place because mundane things are unusual. It's the sameness of the familiar that closes minds.