David Runciman: Technology moves faster than politics. When technology escapes from political control, politicians face a choice: do they adapt to the change, or do they insist that it adapts to them?
Tom Mitchell, FT: That's China for you. One day, it's your favorite neighborhood canteen. The next, it's a pile of rubble.
Robert Kaplan: Unless Americans can be led back to an understanding of their enlightened self-interest, to see again how their fate is entangled with that of the world, then the prospects for a peaceful twenty-first century in which Americans and American principles can thrive will be bleak.
Mike Tidwell: What, basically, do we say to our kids in the face of astonishing loss in the natural world? How much of that loss do we even want them to know about, to discover and love, as it changes and exits? What do we owe our kids? What do we owe these places? How do we even talk about all this?
Matthew Power: Bryant closed his laptop and went out into the yard, tossing a tennis ball to his enormous bounding Japanese mastiff. Fingers of snow extended down through the dark forests of the Bitterroot, and high white contrails in the big sky caught the late-afternoon sunlight. The landscape of western Montana, Bryant observed, bears a striking resemblance to the Hindu Kush of eastern Afghanistan -- a place he's seen only pixelated on a monitor. It was a cognitive dissonance he had often felt flying missions, as he tried to remind himself that the world was just as real when seen in a grainy image as with the naked eye, that despite being filtered through distance and technology, cause and effect still applied. This is the uncanny valley over which our drones circle. We look through them at the world, and ultimately stare back at ourselves.
The Royal Tart Toter, via Maria Bustillos: This cosmic dance of bursting decadence and withheld permissions twists all our arms collectively. But, if sweetness can win -- and it can -- then I'll still be here tomorrow, to high five you, yesterday, my friend. Peace.
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