Nick Paumgarten:

Before 4 Times Square and the decade or so at 20 West Forty-third Street, the magazine spent more than fifty years at 25 West Forty-third Street. It was acceptable in those days to pass a woman on the street and say, "Great hat."

L.P. Hartley:

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

Liliana Segura, in 2014:

The truth is, yes, even "hello" can feel like an unwelcome demand.

Clarinda Harriss:

The Tragedy of Hats is that you can never see the one you're wearing,
that no one believes the lies they tell,
that they grow to be more famous than you,
that you could die in one but you won't be buried in it.

David Carr, on Black Mirror:

In all of the episodes, the act of watching -- not doing -- implicates the viewer.

Josh Dzieza:

This is the paranoia at the heart of Black Mirror: we're building systems the full repercussions of which we don't yet understand, and the idea of opting out of them is a myth.

Mallory Ortberg:

A woman falls out of a plane and wakes up to find that it wasn't a plane at all. It was her seven-year-old daughter, who she had murdered because she kept blocking the screen while she (the mother, that is) was trying to watch reality television. Now she's trapped inside of reality television, and all of the judges are seven-year-old girls with cattle prods. The real monster is society.

Samuel Moyn:

If the arc is down, those who miss Tony Judt cannot take solace in the thought that it will someday bend toward justice. The facts have not changed enough.

Mark Danner:

The process, which has never been described more intimately or more convincingly, resembles nothing so much as a postmodern globalized version of the Salem witch trials: zealous inquisitors, untroubled by doubt, applying a relentless violence to conjure up a fantasy world born of the collective terrors of their own imaginations.

When the suffering of the untried and unconvicted becomes nothing more than collateral damage, America has crossed a gulf.

Mark Ames:

As Otis Pike put it, in Watergate the American people were asked to believe that "their President had been a bad person. In this situation they are asked much more; they are asked to believe that their country has been evil. And nobody wants to believe that."

Belle Boggs:

If American citizens are to have any chance of speaking truth to power, they will need to have a better handle on the truth part.

Emma Stone:

I made a PowerPoint presentation for my parents when I was 14. I asked them to let me move to L.A.

Steve Coll:

When I asked, in a skeptical tone, about this passionate use of PowerPoint, General Petraeus responded in the staccato of the medium: "It's how you communicate big ideas -- to communicate them effectively."

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

As for those poor people trapped in PowerPoint presentations -- well, for them there is no help.

Peter Norvig:

Using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table: You can do very bad things with it.

Stephen Caldwell and Laurel Tripp

Bullet-point people traffic in the meaningless business-speak of the management consultant, language that eschews equally the nuance and hard numbers of reality.

Ken Armstrong:

At least 10 times in the last two years, US courts have reversed a criminal conviction because prosecutors violated the rules of fair argument with PowerPoint.

Mark Danner:

We know where we came from, and we know where we are. We do not yet know how to get back.

Quinn Norton:

As the legal system drifts further out of sync with reality, the danger slowly but surely grows.

Brad Heath:

At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance.

The radars were first designed for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. They represent the latest example of battlefield technology finding its way home to civilian policing and bringing complex legal questions with it.

Amar Toor & Russell Brandom:

Bill Marczak, a research fellow at CitizenLab and the co-founder of Bahrain Watch, calls FinFisher just the latest step in "productized surveillance," an approach pioneered by companies like Gamma and Milan-based Hacking Team that aims to make digital intrusion as easy and full-service as any other government technology package.

Leslie Gelb:

The world of 2030 will be an ugly place, littered with rebellion and repression. Societies will be deeply fragmented and overwhelmed by irreconcilable religious and political groups, by disparities in wealth, by ignorant citizenry and by states' impotence to fix problems. This world will resemble today's, only almost everything will be more difficult to manage and solve.

Marc Rogers:

Let's face it -- most of today's so-called "cutting edge" security defenses are either so specific, or so brittle, that they really don't offer much meaningful protection against a sophisticated attacker or group of attackers.

Lee Berger:

Any time a scientist says 'we've got this figured out' they are probably wrong.

Lawrence Krauss:

The "null hypothesis" is most often the default hypothesis in science. We reject the null hypothesis (namely that what we think is significant is simply an accident, or noise) only when we have clear evidence to back it up.

Paul Basken:

Randomized trials now account for about 20 percent of the $30 billion annual budget of the National Institutes of Health. Private drug companies spend more than $30 billion on them. Yet drug trials fail at a rate of about 90 percent. The trials' high failure rate is driven in part by companies' pushing for trials before they've taken the time to test their theories more thoroughly in the lab. That may seem shortsighted, but executives sometimes appear motivated more by the short-term career boost from a trial announcement than by the fear of a negative result many years down the line.

Peter Orszag argued that far too many commonplace medical practices and procedures lack grounding in a scientifically rigorous test of their effectiveness. It's therefore critical to make trial practices more efficient, so that the many questions needing answers in medicine can be thoroughly vetted.

Ignorance is bliss:

Ernie: Is there anything fluffier than a cloud?

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

Loren Brichter:

Some remarkable stuff throughout history has been accomplished by individuals -- part of the trick is standing on the right shoulders.

Richard Hamming:

Pasteur said, "Luck favors the prepared mind." The prepared mind sooner or later finds something important and does it. The particular thing you do is luck, but that you do something is not.

Lauren Clark:

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

Werner Herzog:

Always take the initiative.

Decius:

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

Richard Hamming:

There are so many alibis. Why weren't you first? Why didn't you do it right? Don't try an alibi. Don't try and kid yourself. You can tell other people all the alibis you want. I don't mind. But to yourself try to be honest.

Joan Didion:

Self-deception remains the most difficult deception.

Richard Hamming:

The misapplication of effort is a very serious matter. If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

Caterina Fake:

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

Richard Hamming:

You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done.

Jony Ive:

What focus means is saying no with every bone in your body to something you know is a good idea but you say no because you're focused on something else.

James Comey:

The Internet is the most dangerous parking lot imaginable.

Mark Painter:

The means to perpetrate wide scale damage are in place. All that's lacking is intent.

Chris Meenan:

Threats are pervasive. The Internet communication vector means they will always have an attack surface, so we must, at a minimum, record everything.

Threat Assessment:

Lisa: Uh, are you sure that's safe?
Kearny: Well it ain't gettin' any safer.

Peter Beinart:

As in past years, Obama boasted about having withdrawn troops from Afghanistan and about no longer "sending large ground forces overseas." But in a marked shift from previous years, he stopped claiming that all this had made America safer from terrorism.

And now, in his final year in office, he's not only stopped telling Americans they are safer. He's declaring war.

Leon Wieseltier:

There are worse things than being wrong.

Adam Gopnik:

Even doing the right thing rarely works out. What history generally "teaches" is how hard it is for anyone to control it, including the people who think they're making it.

David Runciman:

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?

Barack Obama:

Will we approach the world fearful and reactive, dragged into costly conflicts that strain our military and set back our standing? Or will we lead wisely, using all elements of our power to defeat new threats and protect our planet?

David Runciman:

The only thing that can rein in the state is a more powerful state.

John Regehr:

If you were given the opportunity to spend USD 100 million over five years to maximally improve the security of open source software, what would you do? I'll admit that it is possible (and worrying) that USD 100 M isn't enough to make much of a dent in our current and upcoming problems.

Paul Graham Raven:

Better technology doesn't necessarily mean thinking about what a technology does or how it does it, but about why you wanted the technology in the first place, and what you definitely don't want it to do.

Loren Brichter:

It's not like a boat with a couple of holes that we can patch; it's more like trying to sail across an ocean on a pile of accrued garbage.

Robert Graham:

This War on Hackers is likely to be no more effective than the War on Drugs.

Scott Long:

To combat violence you must look unflinchingly at the concrete inequities and practices that breed it.

Christopher Soghoian:

The reason why we don't have any serious proposals on the table that would improve cybersecurity, is because big companies don't actually want to be held accountable.

Shikha Dalmia:

Regimes change course only when the cost of maintaining the status quo exceeds the cost of enacting change.