Michael Chertoff:

We are in a race against time.

Nicole Perlroth:

Janet Napolitano knows she has a problem that will only worsen. So she needs her own hackers. "We have to show them how cool and exciting this is," said Ed Skoudis.

One answer? Start young, and make it a game, even a competition.

Mary Meeker:

Do humans want everything to be like a game?

Abigail Pesta:

For the past year and a half, Brett Coulthard has been running a business, the Frivolous Engineering Co., that sells kits to build useless machines. For people who would rather not spend any money on a useless machine, Mr. Coulthard also provides free instructions.

Marvin Minsky dreamed up the useless machine, although the name he gave it was the "ultimate machine."

Nathan Heller:

Back in Sweden, the guys told me, they were studying computer science at university, and -- well, you know how it is: one thing leads to another, and soon you find yourself carving sheep bellies for a little extra cash.

Benjamin Carlson:

The "junket" industry of Macau brings high-rolling gamblers to the territory and collects debts on behalf of the casinos. These businesses also allow VIPs to stake more than the $50,000 legal limit on how much money Chinese are permitted to take out of the country every year. (In essence, junkets collect their clients' money on the Chinese side of the border and give them loans to gamble on the Macau side.)

Luke Mogelson:

Daowood's method was different. When a fighting-age male struck him as suspicious, the colonel would use his thumbs and index fingers to pull open both of the man's eyelids. Then he would lean close and stare searchingly. Usually, after several seconds, as though he had suddenly found precisely what he was looking for, Daowood would declare, in mock surprise, "He's Taliban!"

It was a joke, of course -- one that mostly made fun of the Americans. A few years ago, the coalition embarked on an ambitious enterprise to record in an electronic database the biometric information of hundreds of thousands of Afghan citizens, and a hallmark of American patrols has subsequently been the lining up of villagers to digitally register their eyes and fingerprints. Daowood's faux iris scan was in part an acknowledgment of the A.N.A.'s inferior technology. But it was also a dig at the coalition's somewhat desperate reliance on technology. Where Daowood's interactions with villagers were always intimate, it is hard to imagine a more clinical and alienating dynamic between two people than that of the NATO service member aiming his Hand-held Interagency Identity Detection Equipment at the face of a rural Afghan farmer. In such moments, the difference in the field between the U.S. and Afghan soldier is far starker than that of the foreigner and the native. It is more akin to the difference in the ocean between a scuba diver and a fish.

David Foster Wallace:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

Jared Diamond:

Americans' thinking about dangers is confused. We obsess about the wrong things, and we fail to watch for real dangers.

Charles Simic:

I found myself worrying. As my fellow Serbs say, inside each one of us lurks a turd.

Robert Krulwich:

Where, they wondered, did that poop come from?

Tim Cook:

There are always things that are unknowable.

Colin Powell:

Be careful what you choose. You may get it.

Donald Rumsfeld:

Don’'t divide the world into "them" and "us."

Tyler Cohen:

People tend to think that they have justice on their side, whether it comes to making or taking.

For example, millions of homeowners have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on the premise that the tax deduction for mortgages will be continued.

It becomes difficult for a politician to articulate exactly what is wrong with this arrangement when the audience itself is in on the game and perhaps does not want to hear about its own takings.

Dave Itzkoff:

As a chauffeured town car drove him to a favorite waffle restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, RZA said he was no longer the grandstanding show-off he presented in his musical heyday.

Jacques Barzun:

When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.

Elizabeth Bernstein:

It is best not to forgive too soon.

The fuller version of Urban Outlaw debuted at the Raindance Film Festival in London, and is now available to watch from the comfort of your own computer. Sit back, grab your Porsche hat, dim the lights and enjoy the complete story by scrolling down below.

Watch the entire 30-minute Urban Outlaw documentary

Front and Follow:

This risky tactic, conducted at close quarters, is used to track targets on the move, usually on foot. Two surveillance operatives approach the target at different times. The first falls in behind the target and begins following him discreetly. The second operative predicts the target's path and takes up a position ahead of him. The two agents continue in this manner until the front operative feels the need to lie low or misinterprets the target's destination. Then the following operative repositions to the front and the other operative falls in behind.

Cal Newport:

Every time our work becomes hard, we are pushed toward an existential crisis, centered on what for many is an obnoxiously unanswerable question: "Is this what I'm really meant to be doing?" This constant doubt generates anxiety and chronic job-hopping.

Louis Menand:

The motto of athletic competition should not be "Follow your dream." It should be "Follow your reality."

James Gleick:

One by one we are outsourcing our mental functions to the global prosthetic brain.

I can live with that.

Gabe Newell:

The big problem that is holding back Linux is games. People don't realize how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behavior.

Mary Meeker, Scott Devitt, and Liang Wu:

Do humans want everything to be like a game?

Paul Ford:

In order to participate as a citizen of the social web, you must yourself manufacture content. Progress requires that forms must be filled. Thus it is a critical choice of any adult as to where they will perform their free labor.

Kenneth Rogoff:

We're not in the endgame, we're in the middle-game.

James Suroweicki:

The only way to win the game is simply not to play.

Sam Anderson:

Today we are living, for better and worse, in a world of stupid games.

The enemy in Tetris is not some identifiable villain (Donkey Kong, Mike Tyson, Carmen Sandiego) but a faceless, ceaseless, reasonless force that threatens constantly to overwhelm you, a churning production of blocks against which your only defense is a repetitive, meaningless sorting. It is bureaucracy in pure form, busywork with no aim or end, impossible to avoid or escape. And the game's final insult is that it annihilates free will. Despite its obvious futility, somehow we can't make ourselves stop rotating blocks. Tetris, like all the stupid games it spawned, forces us to choose to punish ourselves.

Gamification seeks to turn the world into one giant chore chart covered with achievement stickers -- the kind of thing parents design for their children -- though it raises the potentially terrifying question of who the parents are. This, I fear, is the dystopian future of stupid games: amoral corporations hiring teams of behavioral psychologists to laser-target our addiction cycles for profit.

The legendary game designer Sid Meier once defined a game as, simply, "a series of interesting choices." Maybe that's the secret genius of stupid games: they force us to make a series of interesting choices about what matters, moment to moment, in our lives.

Rosecrans Baldwin:

Most members of post-industrial societies perceive themselves as happenstance cogs in a clockwork universe, and consequently, exhibit a profound and increasingly dangerous alienation. The dissociation of self is so fundamental that bioregions are sub-divided into tract housing, resources into quarterly earnings, and people into one-percenters and the rest.

William J. H. Andrewes:

The schemes that divided the day into 24 equal parts varied according to the start of the count: Italian hours began at sunset, Babylonian hours at sunrise, astronomical hours at midday and "great clock" hours (used for some large public clocks in Germany) at midnight. Eventually these and competing systems were superseded by "small clock," or French, hours, which split the day, as we currently do, into two 12-hour periods commencing at midnight.

Hersfold:

Wikipedia would be a shambles without bots.

Ethan Zuckerman:

As we enter an age of increased global connection, we are also entering an age of increasing participation. The billions of people worldwide who access the Internet via computers and mobile phones have access to information far beyond their borders, and the opportunity to contribute their own insights and opinions. It should be no surprise that we are experiencing a concomitant rise in mystery that parallels the increases in connection.

The challenge for anyone who wants to decipher the mysteries of a connected age is to understand how the Internet does, and does not, connect us. Only then can we find ways to make online connection more common and more powerful.

Freeman Dyson:

The truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won't come to pass.

Jason Fried:

Pushing back means you already think you know. Asking questions means you want to know. Ask more questions.

Beth Gardner:

Sometimes, when forming our opinions, we grasp at whatever information presents itself, no matter how irrelevant.

Joe Nocera:

Repetition is all-important to spreading a Big Lie.

Nick Bilton:

Laura J. Brown, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs for the F.A.A., said that the agency has decided to take a "fresh look" at the use of personal electronics on planes.

It is in everyone's interest that we move from unscientific fears to real scientific testing.

Charles Gross:

Science is driven by two powerful motivations -- to discover the "truth," while acknowledging how fleeting it can be, and to achieve recognition through publication in prominent journals, through grant support to continue and expand research, and through promotion, prizes and memberships in prestigious scientific societies. The search for scientific truth may be seriously derailed by the desire for recognition, which may result in scientific misconduct.

Steve Moore:

Frankly, the professional experience I have had with TSA has frightened me. Once, I was bypassing screening (on official FBI business) with my .40 caliber semi-automatic pistol, and a TSA officer noticed the clip of my pocket knife. "You can't bring a knife on board," he said. I looked at him incredulously and asked, "The semi-automatic pistol is okay, but you don't trust me with a knife?" His response was equal parts predictable and frightening, "But knives are not allowed on the planes."

An unnamed officer:

In the end, it was just easier to do nothing than to, you know, rock the boat.

Greg Afinogenov:

The premise of 19th-century liberal democracy, which envisioned national communities as largely self-enclosed and politics as localized debates on the common good, becomes less tenable with each passing year.

Russian democracy became a caricature of the caricature once drawn by Soviet propagandists: it was a pseudo-politics serving only to conceal the controlling hand of moneyed interests. Unlike in Western democracies, however, in Russia everyone was aware of the deception.

By 2003, four-fifths of Russians agreed with the statement, "Democratic procedures are pure show business." In an American context, these words would sound like an angry call for reform. In Putin's Russia, they were a pledge of allegiance.

Julian Schnabel:

Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are.

Nizar Qabbani:

Dive into the sea, or stay away.

On sailing:

The stars, and even the moon, were so perfectly reflected that you couldn't find the horizon, so it seemed as if our boat was a satellite in space, surrounded above, below and on all sides by stars.

Jhumpa Lahiri:

The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail.

Lal Ded, translated by Ranjit Hoskote:

You can stir as much salt as you like in water,
It won't become the sea.

Ben McGrath:

The first time Sheila McClear had lunch with Nick Denton, she returned to the office afterward and threw up. She attributed this to food poisoning, but it happened again the second time they had lunch.

Jonathan Blaustein:

Just because we can put something in our mouths, does that make it food? At what point do we decide that something isn't food?

Frank Rich:

More than 60 percent of Twitter users abandon it after a single month.

Ronald Bailey:

Half the crime in Seattle occurs on 4.5 percent of that city's streets; just over 3 percent of street addresses and intersections generated half the crimes in Minneapolis; and 8 percent of street blocks accounted for 66 percent of robberies in Boston.

Vanda Felbab-Brown:

To get all its extra supplies out of Afghanistan, NATO needs to send one container over the Afghan border every seven minutes from now until 2015.

Elizabeth Dickinson:

Roughly 50,000 lives have been lost since Mexico's experiment with a Colombian-style militarized drug war began in 2006. The Citizen's Council for Public Security in Mexico recently estimated the kidnapping rate at three times that of Colombia's darkest days. By November 2011, 80 percent of the population ... said they believed security to be worse than just a year ago. A mere 14 percent believed that the government could beat the drug gangs.

Brad Stone:

Google+ has attracted 100 million members, who spent an average of 3.3 minutes on the service in January, according to ComScore (SCOR). Facebook's 850 million users spend an average of 7.5 hours a month on that site.

Lizette Alvarez:

The I.R.S. receives 100 million tax returns a year, most filed within a short period of time and a vast majority legitimate.

From 2008 to 2011, the number of returns filed by identity thieves and stopped by the I.R.S. increased significantly, officials said. Last year, it was at least 1.3 million ...

This year, with only 30 percent of the filings reviewed so far, the number is already at 2.6 million.

Peter Fader:

Among financial academics, chartists tend to be regarded as quacks. But a lot of the Big Data people are exactly like them. They say, "We are just going to stare at the data and look for patterns, and then act on them when we find them." In short, there is very little real science in what we call "data science," and that's a big problem.

Actuaries can say with great confidence what percent of people with your characteristics will live to be 80. But no actuary would ever try to predict when you are going to die. They know exactly where to draw the line.