Shirley Wang:

One way of interpreting the findings is that the medicine proves effective on immediate classroom behaviors like sitting still and interrupting the teacher less, but it doesn't help with other factors important to successful completion of homework or test-taking, like family encouragement.

The Economist:

South Korean parents will not even embark on having a child until they are sure they have the resources to groom it for success. As a result, South Korea suffers from a shortage of happy mediocrities, countercultural rebels, slackers, dropouts and eccentrics. These people, in effect, remain unborn.

Tabitha Speelman:

Middle-class Chinese parents choosing to feed their child foreign milk powder might spend anywhere from 25-40% of their monthly salary.

AFP:

Human breast milk has become a new luxury for China's rich, with some firms offering wet-nurse services … Xinxinyu, a domestic staff agency in the booming city of Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong, provided wet nurses for newborns, the sick and other adults who pay high prices for the milk's fine nutrition. Adult [clients] can drink it directly through breastfeeding, or they can always drink it from a breast pump if they feel embarrassed. Wet nurses serving adults are paid about 16,000 yuan (US$2,610) a month -- more than four times the Chinese average -- and those who are "healthy and good looking" can earn even more.

BBC:

Mistresses have become the ultimate symbol of corruption in China.

Ken Auletta:

When the mercurial Robert Maxwell closed the Daily News, Alan Rusbridger welcomed an offer from the Guardian to return to London as a feature writer. In 1992, the editor, Peter Preston, offered him the editorship of a weekend supplement. ... When Kurt Cobain died, the section ran an extensive account of his life and death. "All the graybeards came and said, 'Why are we doing this?' " he recalls. "I said, 'Our daughters are crying. That's why we're doing this.' "

Adam Grant:

Daughters apparently soften fathers and evoke more caretaking tendencies. The speculation is that as we brush our daughters' hair and take them to dance classes, we become gentler, more empathetic and more other-oriented.

Paul Ford:

One day I went to pick up my kids from day care and loaded them into their giant stroller, the size of a French car. Suddenly I looked at my daughter and was convinced that she was some other child. What if the day care had switched her with a similar-looking girl? What if I'd had some kind of stroke that kept me from recognizing my daughter? I couldn't sort it out, even as I walked home with full knowledge that I was both tired and crazy. She was too young to talk, so I couldn't ask her.

Benjamin J. Ames:

In the end, nothing competes with fireworks.

Tyrone Cohen:

In politics, as in management more generally, if you always look good you are doing something badly wrong.

Paul Ford:

Being a mother means that you are always doing something that someone thinks is horrible. It's like wearing sweatpants to a wake.

Donald Rumsfeld:

If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.

Mark Oppenheimer:

When I am feeling bad for not being more celebrated, my children are a comfort; thinking of more celebrated writers or editors with fewer children is also a comfort. I would call it Schadenfreude, but can one properly take pleasure in others' misfortune if the unfortunate ones don't know that they are unfortunate? If it doesn't bother them, can their lack of fecundity please me?

David Foster Wallace:

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

Glenn Greenwald:

I didn't want to be representing rich people. I wanted to be suing them.

Robert Whitaker:

We are always looking for easy money, but we are perhaps even more eager for a good emotion.

Amanda Hess:

It is time for us to recognize the hug for the charade that it is.

Maddie Biron, 16:

I post for the likes. ... [But] I don't mind not being famous. I wouldn't want to give up my sense of privacy.

Manohla Dargis:

Every so often, someone says something that puts the stakes and intensifying throb of fear into unambiguous perspective.

Dan Geer:

As society becomes more technologic, even the mundane comes to depend on distant digital perfection. Our food pipeline contains less than a week's supply, just to take one example, and that pipeline depends on digital services for everything from GPS driven tractors to robot vegetable sorting machinery to coast-to-coast logistics to RFID-tagged livestock. Is all the technologic dependency and the data that fuels it making us more resilient or more fragile?

Nicola:

Each silvery ship floating through the air represented up to 33 million potential sausage casings, sacrificed to the Kaiser's nationalist cause. And thus the dawn of aerial bombardment -- and, with it, the contemporary model of total war -- was dependent on a sausage-free civilian diet, in one of the more unusual examples of the militarisation of food.

David Pogue:

13 years is a long time to stay in one place; we all thrive on new experiences.

Decius:

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

Dan Geer:

The price of freedom is the probability of crime.

Christopher Glazek:

Crime has not fallen in the United States -- it's been shifted.

The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

Popular resentment against an authoritarian state shouldn't be denied or pooh-poohed -- it should be seized and marshaled toward progressive ends.

Tony Judt:

The question is not going to be, Will there be an activist state? The question is going to be, What kind of an activist state?

Christopher Glazek:

More African Americans are in prison today than were enslaved in the 1850s.

Dan Geer:

As technology progresses, your choice will not be between Big Brother or no Big Brother, rather it is already between one Big Brother and lots of Little Brothers. Think carefully, yours is the last generation that will have a choice.

Decius:

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

Laura Pappano:

Most homes in Ulan Bator have Internet connections, and almost everyone, including nomads, has at least one cellphone.

Even on the steppe, with only sheep in sight, you can get a signal.

Lesley M. M. Blume:

Disconnecting is a luxury that we all need.

Libby Purves:

There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.

An FBI spokesperson, who asked not to be named:

No one is beyond the reach of the FBI. We will find you.

Trip Gabriel:

J. Preston Van Winkle, the fourth generation in the business, said that he and his father, Julian Van Winkle III, are raising production because of the demand, but that it takes time. "You can't make 20-year bourbon in less than 20 years," he said.

Connie Herring:

You can't pay it forward if you're broke.

Maciej Ceglowski:

Walden is a layered work. You can't just go in and strip-mine it for a bunch of Tim Ferriss-style life hacks ...

Douglas R. Hofstadter, on the life-extension work of Ray Kurzweil:

A very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It's as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad.

Freddie deBoer:

Sometimes you have to eat shit in your life, so you eat it. It's just a question of what you can accept and what you can't.

The Electoral Victor:

You have elected yourselves, you see, and you can't get a more fair dinkum democratic outcome than that.

Lawrence Lessig:

In the academy, there is no truth without a statistical regression. So few will risk reputation or promotion by speculating beyond the facts that SPSS will whisper.

But in the middle of a crisis, certainty is an expensive luxury, and one we can't afford anymore. We need to tackle the problems that explain most of our problems first, and soon.

Jean-Luc Godard:

It's not where you take things from -- it's where you take them to.

Vannevar Bush:

The process of tying two items together is the important thing.

Dan Geer:

This is perhaps our last fundamental tradeoff before the Singularity occurs: Do we, as a society, want the comfort and convenience of increasingly technologic, invisible digital integration enough to pay for those benefits with the liberties that must be given up to be protected from the downsides of that integration?

It is your choice and responsibility whether to demand protections and conveniences and services that can only be done with pervasive data. It is your choice and responsibility whether to fear only fear itself or to fear the absence of fear. It is your choice and responsibility to be part of the problem or part of the solution.

Decius:

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

Sara Wheeler:

Fearful of losing my bearings, I stopped to fish this map from my pack and spread it on the ice. Created by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in the 1980s, it represents part of the Antarctic continent on a 1:250,000 scale. I traced my route by topographical landmarks, including an especially pointy mountain which the glaciologists had called the Doesn't Matterhorn. My finger came to a zigzag drawn with a ruler marked "Limit of compilation". Beyond that, the sheet was blank. I had reached the end of the map.

That was where I wanted to be. Uncharted territory.

I like this map for its lack of human spoilage -- no cities or highways. In London, hunched in my office behind a rain-spattered window, I often unfurl it and trace the glaciers and valleys I once knew so well. But in my dreams, I always stand at the Limit of compilation.

Dexter Filkins:

The cooperation between the two countries lasted through the initial phase of the war. At one point, the lead negotiator handed Crocker a map detailing the disposition of Taliban forces. "Here's our advice: hit them here first, and then hit them over here. And here's the logic." Stunned, Crocker asked, "Can I take notes?" The negotiator replied, "You can keep the map." The flow of information went both ways. On one occasion, Crocker said, he gave his counterparts the location of an Al Qaeda facilitator living in the eastern city of Mashhad. The Iranians detained him and brought him to Afghanistan's new leaders, who, Crocker believes, turned him over to the U.S. The negotiator told Crocker, "Haji Qassem is very pleased with our cooperation."

Reuben Fischer-Baum:

Baby naming generally follows a consistent cycle: A name springs up in some region of the U.S. -- "Ashley" in the South, "Emily" in the Northeast -- sweeps over the country, and falls out of favor nearly as quickly. The big exception to these baby booms and busts is "Jennifer", which absolutely dominates America for a decade-and-a-half. If you're named Jennifer and you were born between 1970 and 1984, don't worry! I'm sure you have a totally cool, unique middle name.

Notably, the recession seems to have put a temporary damper on creative baby naming. In 2007, eight different baby names made the map -- including less-traditional names like Addison, Ava, and Madison -- and all carried at least two states. By 2012 the map has just five names, and 47 states went with either "Sophia" or "Emma." A yearning for simpler times?

Matt Weiland:

Names on the Land reflects a glorious union of two primal forces in the American mind. On one hand, Americanism: the inclination toward the large-scale and industrial, toward manifest destiny and the farthest shore, toward what a French critic a century ago called the American "worship of size, mass, quantity and numbers." On the other, Americana: the craving for the local and the lo-fi, for the inward heart of things, for the handcrafted and the homemade.

Lee Berger:

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

Economist:

Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying -- to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity.

Lee Billings:

Very few [scientists] are really lauded and richly rewarded for their work in comparison to even C-list Hollywood celebrities. For instance, look at the case of Jim Kasting, a quiet, thoughtful Penn State geoscientist ... [who] basically figured out how the cycling of carbon between a planet’s atmosphere, ocean, and crust stabilizes the climate over geological timescales. In other words, he helped show how and why Earth has managed for billions of years to be a reasonably nice place to live. ... Kasting has sketched out some canonical limits for life as we know it around stars, and he has also made a scientifically robust forecast for the end of the world.

Here is a man working on topics that have profound, fundamental importance for every single living being on Earth and yet he toils away in obscurity in a tiny little office. Essentially no one outside of the field knows who he is, and even within the field he has limited power; he certainly isn’t able to pull any political or financial strings to help get his dreamed-for telescopes built. His story is by no means unique; in fact, it’s the norm for great scientists.

I think these sorts of jarring juxtapositions are important to acknowledge. They help reveal the unthinking boosterism and naive idealism that all too often passes as popular science communication today.