Etay Zwick:

At the best of times, Wall Street provides white noise amidst entrepreneurs' and workers' attempts to actualize their ambitions and projects. We are still learning what happens at the worst of times.

Joel Kotkin:

Britain's welfare state now accounts for nearly one-third of government spending.

Jaron Lanier:

Web 2.0 is a formula to kill the middle class and undo centuries of social progress.

Jeffrey Rosen:

It's often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances -- no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you've done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

Christopher Ahlberg, CEO at Recorded Future:

We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.

Nathaniel Persily:

There used to be a theory that gerrymandering was self-regulating. But it's not self-regulating anymore. We have become very good at predicting how people are going to vote. The software is too good, and the partisanship is too strong.

Richard Betts:

In times of change, people wonder more consciously about how the world works.

Virginia Postrel:

In 2008, Americans owned an average of 92 items of clothing, not counting underwear, bras and pajamas.

By contrast, consider a middle-class worker's wardrobe during the Great Depression. Instead of roughly 90 items, it contained fewer than 15.

Kira Cochrane:

Last year, a poll for tissue manufacturer SCA found that 41% of British men and 33% of women don't shower every day, with 12% of people only having a proper wash once or twice a week.