Gretchen Reynolds:

Every single hour of television watched after the age of 25 reduces the viewer's life expectancy by 21.8 minutes.

By comparison, smoking a single cigarette reduces life expectancy by about 11 minutes.

Caleb Crain:

In August, scientists at the University of Washington revealed that babies aged between eight and sixteen months know on average six to eight fewer words for every hour of baby DVDs and videos they watch daily.

Penelope Trunk:

Stop talking about time like you need to save it. You just need to use it better.

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Mason, Waters, Wright, and Gilmour:

And you run and run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Time Keeps On Ticking

James Bridle:

Everything should have a history button.

Marc Rotenberg:

It's no surprise that governments and vendors are very enthusiastic. But from a privacy perspective, it's one of the most intrusive technologies conceivable.

David Clark:

Don't forget about forgetting.

Matt Warman:

Users could sue websites for invading their privacy and would have a right to be "forgotten" online, under new proposals from the European Union.

Maria Fife:

It's gotten to the point where they need to be in all of our decisions.
They don't trust us to make good choices on our own.

Dr. Yefim Sheynkin:

Millions and millions of men are using laptops now, especially those in the reproductive age range. Within 10 or 15 minutes their scrotal temperature is already above what we consider safe, but they don't feel it. You can put a pillow beneath your computer and it still won't protect you.

Bill Bryson:

It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung.

Mason, Waters, Wright, and Gilmour:

And you run and run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

John Allen Paulos:

In listening to stories we tend to suspend disbelief in order to be entertained, whereas in evaluating statistics we generally have an opposite inclination to suspend belief in order not to be beguiled.

Cordelia Hebblethwaite:

One group was given the lists in 16-point Arial pure black font, which is generally regarded to be easy and clear to read.

The other had the same information presented in either 12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale font or 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale.

The volunteers were distracted for 15 minutes, and then tested on how much they could remember.

Researchers found that, on average, those given the harder-to-read fonts actually recalled 14% more.

Anthony York:

Jenny Oropeza, who died after a long illness last month, was reelected to another term in the state Senate on Tuesday. With more than half of the vote counted, voters in Oropeza's Long Beach district gave her more than 54% percent of the vote. Republican John Stammreich trailed with 40% of the vote.

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.

John Krainer and Stephen LeRoy:

House prices have fallen approximately 30% from their peak in 2006, accompanied by a level of defaults and foreclosures without precedent in the post-World War II era. Many homeowners have mortgages with principal amounts higher than the market value of their properties. In general, though, the rational default point is below the "underwater" point where house price equals the remaining loan balance, and depends on prospects for future house price appreciation and borrower default costs.

Eric Dash and Nelson D. Schwartz:

About 11.5 percent of borrowers are in default today, up from 5.7 percent from two years earlier.

CoreLogic, at the end of Q2 2010:

23 percent of all residential properties with mortgages were in negative equity.

Sara Murray:

Washington, D.C. had the largest share of residents receiving food stamps: More than a fifth, 21.1%, of its residents collected assistance in August. Washington was followed by Mississippi, where 20.1% of residents received food stamps, and Tennessee, where 20% tapped into the government nutrition program.

Mark Twain:

In my early manhood and in middle-life, I used to vex myself with reforms, every now and then. And I never had occasion to regret these divergencies, for whether the resulting deprivations were long or short, the rewarding pleasures which I got out of the vice when I returned to it, always paid me for all that it cost.

Benjamin Franklin:

It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.

Decius:

Is our curse the endless pursuit of a happiness which can never be attained?

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Jonah Lehrer:

We've come to realize that we're not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

Paul Buchheit:

I try to avoid having plans for my life, but I have many ideas. Which ones actually happen will be a surprise to me. It's more fun that way.

Lauren Clark:

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

Louis Kahn:

A good idea that doesn't happen is no idea at all.

Decius:

I said I'd do something about this, and I am.

Ed Tom Bell:

You can say it's my job to fight it but I don't know what it is anymore.

More than that, I don't want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, okay, I'll be part of this world.

An exchange:

Ernie: Is there anything fluffier than a cloud?

Big Tom: If there is, I don't want to know about it.

Paul Graham:

Several people have told me they like the iPad because it lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would be too conspicuous.

In other words, it's a hip flask.

Matthew DuVerne Hutchinson:

From the crisp scent of vomit-soaked pizza boxes baking in the sunrise on East Sound Pier, to the pink-and-orange sunsets softly shimmering behind the West Railyard prostitute encampments, I love every inch of this town.

I took my first body shot right around the time I spoke my first word, and that word was "body shot."

And yet I fear that our children might not grow up in the same Margaritaville we've been able to enjoy.

David Foster Wallace:

There is no such thing as not worshipping.

Everybody worships.

The only choice we get is what to worship.

Tom Friedman:

We're entering an era where being in politics is going to be more than anything else about taking things away from people.

It's going to be very, very interesting.

Caterina Fake:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Vannevar Bush:

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.

Atul Gawande:

Let us look for the positive deviants.

Mason, Waters, Wright, and Gilmour:

And you run and run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

The Acceleration of Addictiveness

John Wood:

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.

Curtis White:

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called "the visible God": money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

Ashby Jones:

Happiness exists just around the corner, it's just a matter of figuring out how to get there.

Sarah Silverman:

You're very free if you don't love money.

David Foster Wallace:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

Peter Maass:

Smaller cars, less driving, more carpools, public transportation, better home insulation, smaller homes, less meat, more renewable energy -- these are the sorts of useful things we can do. It little matters whether we fill our tanks at BP or Exxon stations. What matters is that we visit gas stations less often.

Decius:

Our job is to apply our well-earned cynicism and fail to follow the baby boomers off a cliff in their pursuit of some idealistic agenda.

Mark Foulon:

We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient.

Tom Friedman:

We're entering an era where being in politics is going to be more than anything else about taking things away from people. It's going to be very, very interesting.

Wallace:

There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

Angus McCullough:

The only way to end your game is to lose.

The Second Best Time Is Now

Clay Shirky:

I've recently gotten away from the daily news cycle. I've got a weekly clock cycle and a monthly clock cycle. Time is a precious commodity. Increasingly, I'm trying to maximize it.

Tyler Cowen:

My question is: what is the wife maximizing?

Leo Babuta:

Stop being busy and your job is half done.

Scott Berkun:

When I was younger I thought busy people were more important than everyone else. Otherwise why would they be so busy?

Merlin Mann:

It takes a lot of patience and it takes a lot of self-awareness to be open to the fact that you may become popular about something that you didn't want to become popular about.

Andre Agassi:

Even if it's not your ideal life, you can always choose it. No matter what your life is, choosing it changes everything.

Nicholas Bakalar:

People start out at age 18 feeling pretty good about themselves, and then, apparently, life begins to throw curve balls. But by the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18.

Carol Dweck:

Praising children for their intelligence, rather than for their effort, often leads them to give up when they encounter setbacks. Such children tend to become preoccupied with how their performance compares with that of their peers, rather than with finding new strategies to improve their own work.

William Deresiewicz:

I've had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it's been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.

Ben Bernanke:

Ultimately, what makes us happy? What makes our lives satisfying in the long run?

If Thomas Jefferson thought it was important to facilitate the pursuit of happiness, maybe we should think a bit about what that means in practice.

We can look inward for answers, but, at least for someone trained as a social scientist, the most direct way to tackle the question is just to go out and ask people -- lots of people.

danah boyd:

You can count until you're blue in the face, but unless you actually talk to people, you're not going to know why they do what they do.

Nicholas A. Christakis & James Fowler:

Each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%.

Decius:

Paul Graham asks what living in your city tells you. Living in the north Perimeter area for 6 odd years now has told me that everybody makes way, way more money than I do. It's not inspiring so much as it makes you sympathize with class warfare.

Randall Munroe:

What if I want something more than the pale facsimile of fulfillment brought by a parade of ever-fancier toys?

To spend my life restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming?

Is there an app for that?

Bernanke:

When you are working, studying, or pursuing a hobby, do you sometimes become so engrossed in what you are doing that you totally lose track of time?

That feeling is called flow.

If you never have that feeling, you should find some new activities -- whether work or hobbies.

Winifred Gallagher:

You can't be happy all the time, but you can pretty much focus all the time. That's about as good as it gets.

Charles Munger:

The way to win is to work, work, work, work and hope to have a few insights.

Caterina Fake:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Atul Gawande:

Let us look for the positive deviants.

Bernanke:

Ultimately, life satisfaction requires more than just happiness. Sometimes, difficult choices can open the doors to future opportunities, and the short-run pain can be worth the long-run gain. Just as importantly, life satisfaction requires an ethical framework. Everyone needs such a framework. In the short run, it is possible that doing the ethical thing will make you feel, well, unhappy. In the long run, though, it is essential for a well-balanced and satisfying life.

Freeman Dyson:

You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Lauren Clark:

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

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.

Vannevar Bush, 1945:

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.

Benjamin Franklin:

It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.

Bruce Schneier:

Will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good?

Gary Wolf:

If you want to replace the vagaries of intuition with something more reliable, you first need to gather data. Once you know the facts, you can live by them.

Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira:

Follow the data.

David Lynch:

So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?

David Clark:

Don't forget about forgetting.

Gary Wolf:

When we quantify ourselves, there isn't the imperative to see through our daily existence into a truth buried at a deeper level. Instead, the self of our most trivial thoughts and actions, the self that, without technical help, we might barely notice or recall, is understood as the self we ought to get to know. Behind the allure of the quantified self is a guess that many of our problems come from simply lacking the instruments to understand who we are. Our memories are poor; we are subject to a range of biases; we can focus our attention on only one or two things at a time. We don't have a pedometer in our feet, or a breathalyzer in our lungs, or a glucose monitor installed into our veins. We lack both the physical and the mental apparatus to take stock of ourselves. We need help from machines.

Drew Endy:

My guess is that our ultimate solution to the crisis of health-care costs will be to redesign ourselves so that we don't have so many problems to deal with.

The Data-Driven Life

Annekathryn Goodman:

This is a place of lost treasures: lost lives, families, limbs, homes, work, wishes, hopes, and futures. It is easy to lose one's name here.

Each day, a new woman in active labor arrives. In my last 24 hours in Haiti, four women deliver their babies in our hospital. Each difficult labor reflects the trauma and insecurity of this shifting world. I notice that every woman in labor wants to be held. We develop a system whereby one of us sits behind the woman and holds her, another rubs her back, and I sit or kneel near her, touching her belly and legs, whispering words of encouragement. I pray, and I watch the woman's face for clues as the labor progresses. After the lost children arrive, I notice the similarities in the way we cradle them and the way we hold the laboring women. This ministry of hugs reflects our desperate attempt to stabilize the random, cruel chaos in this world of loss and grief.

David Foster Wallace:

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

Atul Gawande:

The social dimension turns out to be as essential as the scientific.

Caterina Fake:

So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be.

Temple Grandin:

When I was younger I was looking for this magic meaning of life. It's very simple now. Making the lives of others better, doing something of lasting value, that's the meaning of life, it's that simple.

Paul Romer:

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Decius:

Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

Ministry of Touch