Douglas Rushkoff:

Corporatism, with its promotion of competition between individuals over scarce resources and money, laid the ground for individualism and for a heightened concept of the self.

Alina Tugend:

How do we go back to the idea that ordinary can be extraordinary? How do we teach our children -- and remind ourselves -- that life doesn't have to be all about public recognition and prizes, but can be more about our relationships and special moments?

Manohla Dargis:

I like some comic-book movies very much, dislike others. But as a film lover I am frustrated by how the current system of flooding theaters with the same handful of titles limits my choices. (According to boxofficemojo.com "The Avengers" opened on 4,349 screens in the United States and Canada, close to 1 in 10.) The success of these movies also shores up a false market rationale that's used to justify blockbusters in general: that is, these movies make money, therefore people like them; people like them, therefore these movies are made.

David Cronenberg:

I really wanted ten million dollars to make Spider and we could only raise eight. And at that point it was, okay, do we make this movie or not? You know, if we make it for eight then it means we all literally have to not get paid. And I include there, Ralph Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, and the Producer and the Writer and the Director -- me, but we all loved the project so much and we were already so far engaged in it, that we all agreed to do that. So we literally all of us, and Patrick McGrath the writer of the novel, we all literally didn't get paid and we made the movie for eight million, but we really needed ten. So that's an unusual moment, and just in terms of financial survival you can't do that very often, because you're spending two years of your life making a movie and you're making zero money during those two years. But that was sort of a happy case because we managed to survive it.

Cormac McCarthy:

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

Charles Simic:

The day I saw Bicycle Thieves I had become an aesthete without realizing it, more concerned with how a particular film was made, than with whatever twists its plot had. All of a sudden, the way the camera moved, a scene was cut and a certain image was framed, were ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Lawrence Lessig:

196 Americans have given more than 80 percent of the super-PAC money spent in the presidential elections so far.

Clive Stafford Smith:

Capital punishment means those without the capital get the punishment.

William Langewiesche:

The Camorra is not an organization like the Mafia that can be separated from society, disciplined in court, or even quite defined. It is an amorphous grouping in Naples and its hinterlands of more than 100 autonomous clans and perhaps 10,000 immediate associates, along with a much larger population of dependents, clients, and friends. It is an understanding, a way of justice, a means of creating wealth and spreading it around. It has been a part of life in Naples for centuries -- far longer than the fragile construct called Italy has even existed. At its strongest it has grown in recent years into a complete parallel world and, in many people's minds, an alternative to the Italian government, whatever that term may mean. Neapolitans call it "the system" with resignation and pride. The Camorra offers them work, lends them money, protects them from the government, and even suppresses street crime. The problem is that periodically the Camorra also tries to tear itself apart, and when that happens, ordinary Neapolitans need to duck.

Michael Sacasas:

When we ask questions about technology we often ask about matters such as safety and efficiency or costs and benefits. We don't often ask, "What sort of person will the use of this or that technology make of me?" Or, more to the present point, "What sort of citizen will the use of this or that technology make of me?"

We speak of technological innovation as if it alone could cure our economic and political ills. We forget that our economic and political culture is finally composed of individuals whose actions are driven by character, and character is in large measure the product of habitual patterns of action. It would be one of history's great ironies if under the cover of the ideology of technology, we allowed our use of technology to erode the habits of the heart essential to the health of our society.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Roger Highfield:

The reality is that, despite fears that our children are "pumped full of chemicals", everything is made of chemicals.

Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University:

Morphologically, we've built a jellyfish. Functionally, we've built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat.

Zoe Williams:

How do you persuade people to hate a body part? You have to horse trade with their existing hatred of a different body part. Capitalism really is ingenious.

Tony Dokoupil:

Altogether the digital shifts of the last five years call to mind a horse that has sprinted out from underneath its rider, dragging the person who once held the reins. No one is arguing for some kind of Amish future. But the research is now making it clear that the Internet is not "just" another delivery system. It is creating a whole new mental environment, a digital state of nature where the human mind becomes a spinning instrument panel, and few people will survive unscathed.

All of us, since the relationship with the Internet began, have tended to accept it as is, without much conscious thought about how we want it to be or what we want to avoid. Those days of complacency should end. The Internet is still ours to shape. Our minds are in the balance.

Ashutosh (Ash) Jogalekar:

Much of the modern world as we know it in the form of metals, plastics, fibers, drugs, detergents, pesticides, fuels, medical implants, food and drink is the direct result of chemistry. Pondering just one of chemistry's myriad creations like jet fuel or PVC or aspirin should convince us of its all-pervasive role in human civilization. It would not be a stretch to say that chemistry's influence on our modern way of life and the rise and fall of nations is equal to that of the development of the calculus.

David Golumbia:

For at least one hundred years and probably much longer, modern societies have been built on the assumption that more rationality and more techne (and more capital) are precisely the solutions to the extremely serious problems that beset our world and our human societies. Yet the evidence that this is not the right solution can be found everywhere.

Russell Jacoby:

As the world becomes more threatening, many people seek simple answers, and many Americans conclude that an elite -- from which they are excluded -- must be the source of the ills. They turn on intellectuals, professors, and presumably the specialized knowledge those experts trade in. Instead of resisting that tendency, conservative intellectuals such as Gelernter encourage it. In their flight from elitism, they end up in a populist swamp peopled by autodidacts and fundamentalists. They become cheerleaders for a world without intellectuals, hastening a future in which they themselves will be irrelevant.

Michael Nielsen:

When something doesn't quite match your expectations of how you think the world actually is, people will often build on that, and they will realize that what seems like a minor discrepancy can actually turn into a really, really big thing.

Roger Kimball:

It is worth pausing to consider how much of our cultural life -- even in its most august precincts -- is caught up in the voracious logic of celebrity. It is a logic that builds obsolescence into the banner of achievement and requires that seriousness abdicate before the palace of notoriety and its sound-bite culture.

Simon Kuper:

Anyone who still believes that politics will uplift humanity is considered a crank. Yet the idea of progress hasn't vanished. It has simply been privatised. They don't think the next human generation will be better off, but they are making darned sure their own children will be.

William Saletan:

Romney will always be what he needs to be. Count on it.

Paul Krugman:

Won't Mr. Romney pay a price for running a campaign based entirely on falsehoods? He obviously thinks not, and I'm afraid he may be right.

Joe Nocera:

They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.

George Packer:

It's easy for most Americans to go days without giving the war a thought.

The military, on its end, seems to want things this way.

What I expect in the next few years is the willful amnesia that always comes with the end of unsuccessful wars.

Charles Simic:

The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.

An educated, well-informed population, the kind that a functioning democracy requires, would be difficult to lie to, and could not be led by the nose by the various vested interests running amok in this country. Most of our politicians and their political advisers and lobbyists would find themselves unemployed, and so would the gasbags who pass themselves off as our opinion makers. Luckily for them, nothing so catastrophic, even though perfectly well-deserved and widely-welcome, has a remote chance of occurring any time soon. For starters, there's more money to be made from the ignorant than the enlightened, and deceiving Americans is one of the few growing home industries we still have in this country. A truly educated populace would be bad, both for politicians and for business.

David Ulin:

Is cosmology just a parlor game, in which our only choice is to take a leap of faith?

Jonathan Moreno, a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania:

Scientists often fail to foresee where their research is headed.

Greg Sandoval:

Even visionaries can misread their customers when they are blinded by their past success.

David Simon:

Nobody knows what anyone's building until it's built.

Dexter Filkins:

Largely prohibited from venturing outside their compounds, many American officials exhibit little knowledge of events beyond the barricades. They often appear to occupy themselves with irrelevant activities such as filling out paperwork and writing cables to their superiors in the United States. Some of them send tweets -- in English, in a largely illiterate country, with limited Internet usage. "Captain America ran the half marathon," a recent Embassy tweet said, referring to a sporting event that took place within the Embassy's protected area. In the early years of the war, diplomats were encouraged to leave their compounds and meet ordinary Afghans. In recent years, personal safety has come to overshadow all other concerns.

It may be that American officers, after eleven years of doing almost everything themselves, have created such a sense of dependency in the Afghan government and military that they must now see if their charges will stand on their own. And maybe they will. But the American strategy appears to be an enormous gamble, propelled by a sense of political and economic fatigue.

Jessica Goodell:

There was an irony of sorts shaping the dynamic between our yellow ribbon decal supporters and us. They were uninformed but good people, the kind whose respect we would welcome -- if it were based upon something true. It was when we were around them that we had to hide the actual truth most consciously.

Chris Hedges:

When Geoff Millard told his mother he wanted to be a Marine, she pleaded with him to consider the National Guard. He agreed to meet with the Guard recruiter, whose pitch was effective and simple: "If you come here, you get to blow shit up."

"I was just like, oh, I get to blow up stuff! I signed up right then and there on the spot. But the interesting thing he didn't tell me was that the 'shit' that he referred to would be kids."

War is about barbarity, perversion, and pain. Human decency and tenderness are crushed, and people become objects to use or kill. The noise, the stench, the fear, the scenes of eviscerated bodies and bloated corpses, the cries of the wounded all combine to spin those in combat into another universe. In this moral void, naively blessed by secular and religious institutions at home, the hypocrisy of our social conventions, our strict adherence to moral precepts, becomes stark. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions that fill our days. It might let us see, although the cost is tremendous.

A thought:

Once upon a time, only a wealthy man could afford to carry time in his pocket.

Later, "clocking in" became a symbol of the working class.

Now, synchrony is out of favor.

And Yet. And Yet.

Billy Hoffman:

Your Time is the most valuable thing that you have. There is nothing more important than how you spend your time.

Colin McSwiggen:

If you want to sit healthily, you'll have to take matters into your own hands; the best habit to develop is not to stay seated for more than ten minutes at a time.

Dexter Filkins:

After eleven years, nearly two thousand Americans killed, sixteen thousand Americans wounded, nearly four hundred billion dollars spent, and more than twelve thousand Afghan civilians dead since 2007, the war in Afghanistan has come to this: the United States is leaving, mission not accomplished. Objectives once deemed indispensable, such as nation-building and counterinsurgency, have been abandoned or downgraded, either because they haven't worked or because there's no longer enough time to achieve them.

Nir Rosen:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Penelope Trunk:

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

Sherry Turkle:

We don't want to intrude on each other, so instead we constantly intrude on each other, but not in 'real time.'

Matt Richtel:

As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.

This growing time-wasting gap, policy makers and researchers say, is more a reflection of the ability of parents to monitor and limit how children use technology than of access to it.

Steven Kurutz:

What emerges over time, for those who live alone, is an at-home self that is markedly different -- in ways big and small -- from the self they present to the world. We all have private selves, of course, but people who live alone spend a good deal more time exploring them.

David Eagleman:

When we examine the problem closely, we find that "time" is not the unitary phenomenon we may have supposed it to be.

Joel Spolsky:

Backlogs make everyone feel good. The trouble is that 90% of the things in the feature backlog will never get implemented, ever. So every minute you spent writing down, designing, thinking about, or discussing features that are never going to get implemented is just time wasted.

Eric Allman:

There is a saying to the effect that there are three variables in engineering: time, functionality, and resources -- pick two. In fact, there is a fourth variable: debt.

The cost of paying back technical debt comes in the form of the engineering time it takes to rewrite or refactor the code or otherwise fix the problem. If the interest you ultimately accrue is less than the cost of paying back the debt, there is no point in paying it back in the first place. The problem is that it can be difficult to know in advance which debts will ultimately have the highest cost.

Daniel Kahneman:

Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.

Alison Gopnik:

Wide-ranging, flexible and broad learning, the kind we encourage in high-school and college, may actually be in tension with the ability to develop finely-honed, controlled, focused expertise in a particular skill, the kind of learning that once routinely took place in human societies. For most of our history, children have started their internships when they were seven, not 27.

Aaron Lake Smith:

Youth culture, and the parameters of cultural rebellion, have always been defined by market forces. The lush alternative landscape of the mid and late '90s, fed by the tech boom and Clinton surplus cash, was like a historical indolent child, at liberty to rebel because it had been given everything. The early '90s depicted in Slacker feel closer to our current epoch -- the recession-tainted youth aimlessly wandering the streets, emailing their resumes into the void.

Bryan Formhals:

The open road impulse, along with a resurgence of the lo-fi film aesthetic has spawned endless blogs, Tumblrs and Flickr streams dedicated to documenting the carefree existence of pretty naked young people who are too busy dreaming to care how boring they look.

W. David Marx:

As with all post-industrial societies, young people were not interested in following their parents' footsteps in the hard work of high-quality manufacturing. Thus, most small artisanal factories have closed, with the remaining few headed in that very direction.

Ironically, Japan's young brands all understand the value of locally hand-sewn clothing, but due to the nation's youth's refusal to take up artisanal crafts, these workspaces will be closed within a decade.

Jessica Grose:

People seem to like the fact that a female bear can kill someone while protecting her cubs and be acquitted of the crime. They want grizzlies to have the benefit of the doubt.

The zero-tolerance policy for man-eating bears invites an obvious question, though. Once a bear kills someone, whether it's out of some wild-animal psychopathy or a natural inclination to defend her young, why wouldn't she eat the corpse? Everyone agrees that it's natural for grizzlies to eat carrion -- they're scavengers, after all.

Brian Vastag:

There are too many laboratory scientists for too few jobs.

Obama has made science education a priority, launching a White House science fair to get young people interested in the field.

But it's questionable whether those youths will be able to find work when they get a PhD. Although jobs in some high-tech areas, especially computer and petroleum engineering, seem to be booming, the market is much tighter for lab-bound scientists -- those seeking new discoveries in biology, chemistry and medicine.

Marge Simpson:

Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.

David Cay Johnston:

National income gained overall in 2010, but all of the gains were among the top 10%. Even within those 15.6 million households, the gains were extraordinarily concentrated among the super-rich, the top 1% of the top 1%.

Just 15,600 super-rich households pocketed an astonishing 37% of the entire national gain.

Economist:

In theory, LIBOR is supposed to be a pretty honest number because it is assumed, for a start, that banks play by the rules and give truthful estimates. The market is also sufficiently small that most banks are presumed to know what the others are doing. In reality, the system is rotten.

"I would sort of express us maybe as not clean, but clean in principle," one Barclays manager apparently said ...

Bill Clinton:

I don't think we ought to get into the position where we say "This is bad work. This is good work."

Robin Nagle:

You can understand the entire cosmos of a culture by looking at its definitions of dirty and clean, and acceptable versus unacceptable, the profane and the sacred. You can start with something as humble as dirt and read it out to an entire worldview.

Hector:

You want to begin in a place that's clean and you make it grow.

Malcolm Gladwell:

The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has to push and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution.

Venkatesh Rao:

Unless you are a professional investor (and probably even then), places to store surplus capital today where it will even be safe and/or not depreciate too fast (let alone generate a return) are getting incredibly hard to find.

But there is one safe haven, if you know how to invest in it: software developers.

Mark Cuban:

The only certainty in the software world is that there is no such thing as bug-free software. When software programs are trying to outsmart other software programs and hack the world's trading platforms, that is a recipe for disaster.

Developers:

Don't stop us now -- we're just getting started!

Michael Lopp:

When an engineer becomes a lead or a manager, they create a professional satisfaction gap. They've observed this gap long before they became a lead with the question: "What does my boss do all day? I see him running around like something is on fire, but ... what does he actually do?" The question gets personal when the now freshly minted manager begins to understand that life as a lead is an endless list of little things that collectively keep you busy, but, in aggregate, don't feel much like progress.

Steven Weinberg:

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

Bunk:

The bigger the lie, the more they believe.

Demotivators:

No matter who you are, you have the potential to be so very much less.

David Albert:

Is there some point at which the possibility of asking any further such questions somehow definitively comes to an end? How would that work? What would that be like?

Charles Simic:

It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today.

No doubt, the Internet and cable television have allowed various political and corporate interests to spread disinformation on a scale that was not possible before, but to have it believed requires a badly educated population unaccustomed to verifying things they are being told.

John Givings:

Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.