Derek Thompson:

If you can't sell a product, try putting something nearly identical, but twice as expensive, next to it.

Even the most useless junk in the world is appealing if the price feels like a steal.

We're not stupid. Just susceptible.

A 1902 issue of The Sphinx, via Diana Kimball:

The times have bred a race of shop magicians who, having acquired the necessary digital skill to handle a few simple tricks, set themselves up in business and look to magical dealers to keep them supplied with an occasional new trick. Half of the regular outfits are simply professional models of tricks that in cheaper form are sold in the toy shops for the personal entertainment of the youth of our land, and there are hundreds of boys 12 years old who are as well posted on the methods of manipulation as are the magicians themselves.

Daniel Kahneman:

After a crisis we tell ourselves we understand why it happened and maintain the illusion that the world is understandable. In fact, we should accept the world is incomprehensible much of the time.

Investment bankers believe in what they do. They don't want to hear that their decisions are no better than chance. The rest of us pay for their delusions.

Jonathan Lethem:

A lot of us want to be fooled at the same time we get angry that we're fooled.

Martin Wolf:

Banks, as presently constituted and managed, cannot be trusted to perform any publicly important function, against the perceived interests of their staff. Today's banks represent the incarnation of profit-seeking behavior taken to its logical limits, in which the only question asked by senior staff is not what is their duty or their responsibility, but what can they get away with.

A final thought from the bankers:

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

Andrew Grant:

In a billion years the sun will unleash 10 percent more energy than it does now, inducing an irrefutable case of global warming here on Earth. The oceans will boil away and the atmosphere will dry out as water vapor leaks into space, and temperatures will soar past 700 degrees Fahrenheit, all of which will transform our planet into a Venusian hell-scape choked with thick clouds of sulfur and carbon dioxide. Bacteria might temporarily persist in tiny pockets of liquid water deep beneath the surface, but humanity's run in these parts would be over.

If the human population can successfully colonize planets orbiting Proxima Centauri or another red dwarf, we can enjoy trillions of years of calamity-free living. Says University of California, Santa Cruz, astronomer Greg Laughlin, "The future lies with red dwarfs."

That is, until the red dwarfs die.

Michael Specter:

One cubic mile of oil would fill a pool that was a mile long, a mile wide, and a mile deep. Today, it takes three cubic miles' worth of fossil fuels to power the world for a year. That's a trillion gallons of gas. To replace just one of those cubic miles with a source of energy that will not add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere--nuclear power, for instance--would require the construction of a new atomic plant every week for fifty years; to switch to wind power would mean erecting thousands of windmills each month. It is hard to conceive of a way to replace that much energy with less dramatic alternatives. It is also impossible to talk seriously about climate change without talking about economic development. Climate experts have argued that we ought to stop emitting greenhouse gases within fifty years, but by then the demand for energy could easily be three times what it is today: nine cubic miles of oil.

Brad Plumer on the work of Marc G. Millis, a former NASA expert on breakthrough propulsion:

We probably won't be ready to travel to other stars for at least another two to five centuries. Even if we do invent faster, niftier spaceships, there may not be enough energy available to reach other stars anytime soon.

No matter when we launch the first interstellar probe, it'll take a long time to reach its destination. Which means it's quite plausible that we'll later invent a newer, faster interstellar probe that gets to the star even sooner, with more modern equipment. Which raises the question of why we even bothered to launch that first probe.

Abdul Nasir:

I've worked with the Afghan Army. They get tired making TV commercials!

Chris Lee:

A large pile of research on various groups of people, covering various skill sets, indicates that in the face of all evidence, humans are irredeemably optimistic about their own abilities. That is, by itself, not such a bad thing. The ugly side shows up when we also realize that the norm must be maintained. Studies show that we do this by considering that everyone else is much worse. Being clueless about your own abilities is one thing. Misjudging others' abilities is relatively more serious.

Robert Roberts:

Accurate self-assessment is a good thing in its place, but it seems almost the opposite of virtuous to be preoccupied with assessing oneself. The person who is constantly asking, "How am I doing?" "How do I measure up?" "How do I rank?" "What am I worth?" is too centered on his or her own value to count as humble in a virtuous sense. Humility, then, on this model, is a non-preoccupation or unconcern about one's rank and status and worth, but not an ignorance of it.

Kurt Eichenwald:

A management system known as "stack ranking" -- a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor -- effectively crippled Microsoft's ability to innovate.

Jack Cheng:

Click me. Like me. Tweet me. Share me. The Fast Web demands that you do things and do them now. The Fast Web is a cruel wonderland of shiny shiny things.

Fast Web is about information. Slow Web is about knowledge. Information passes through you; knowledge dissolves into you.

Stephen Wolfram:

I find it quite interesting that Google's search division recently changed its name to "knowledge division."

Tom Simonite:

"This is the first time the world has seen this scale and quality of data about human communication," Cameron Marlow, the tall 35-year-old leader of the Data Science team, says with a characteristically serious gaze before breaking into a smile at the thought of what he can do with the data.

As executives in every industry try to exploit the opportunities in "big data," the intense interest in Facebook's data technology suggests that its ad business may be just an offshoot of something much more valuable.

David Simon:

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

Kurt Eichenwald:

A management system known as "stack ranking" -- a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor -- effectively crippled Microsoft's ability to innovate. "Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed -- every one -- cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees," Eichenwald writes. "If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review," says a former software developer. "It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies."

A.O. Scott:

When hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, it is never a laughing matter.

Adam Davidson:

There must be an easier way to make money. For the cost of "Men in Black 3," for instance, the studio could have become one of the world's largest venture-capital funds, thereby owning a piece of hundreds of promising start-ups. Instead, it purchased the rights to a piece of intellectual property, paid a fortune for a big star and has no definitive idea why its movie didn't make a huge profit. Why is anyone in the film industry?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

In 2007, Mexican authorities raided the home of Zhenli Ye Gon, a Chinese-Mexican businessman who is believed to have supplied meth-precursor chemicals to the cartel, and discovered $206 million, the largest cash seizure in history. And that was the money Zhenli held onto -- he was an inveterate gambler, who once blew so much cash in Las Vegas that one of the casinos presented him, in consolation, with a Rolls-Royce. "How much money do you have to lose in the casino for them to give you a Rolls-Royce?" Tony Placido, the D.E.A. intelligence official, asked. (The astonishing answer, in Zhenli's case, is $72 million at a single casino in a single year.)

Arlie Russell Hochschild:

The mere existence of a paid wantologist indicates just how far the market has penetrated our intimate lives. Can it be that we are no longer confident to identify even our most ordinary desires without a professional to guide us?

Michael Sacasas:

We buy our books to give shape to our thinking, but it never occurs to us that the manner in which we make our purchases may have a more lasting influence on our character than the contents of the book.

John Garnaut:

Some of China's most respected public intellectuals are warning society and economy are being held hostage to the wealth-maximising requirements of the political elite.

Steve Almond:

Capitalism wears many uniforms. But it's designed to select for psychopathic behaviors. You don't get ahead by doing the right thing, by being kind.

Aaron Swartz, on Chris Hayes:

Meritocracy: we thought we would just simply pick out the best and raise them to the top, but once they got there they inevitably used their privilege to entrench themselves and their kids. Opening up the elite to more efficient competition didn't make things more fair, it just legitimated a more intense scramble. The result was an arms race among the elite, pushing all of them to embrace the most unscrupulous forms of cheating and fraud to secure their coveted positions. ... When your peers are the elite at large, you can never clearly best them.

The egaliatarian demand shouldn't be that we need more black pop stars or female pop stars or YouTube sensation pop stars, but to question why we need elite superstars at all.

Ruchir Sharma, head of emerging markets at Morgan Stanley Investment Management:

Creative destruction lies at the heart of a prospering capitalist society, and because well-connected incumbents have everything to gain from the established order, they are the enemies of capitalism.

The Federal Reserve:

A hypothetical family richer than half the nation's families and poorer than the other half had a net worth of $77,300 in 2010, compared with $126,400 in 2007.

Ranking American families by income, the top 10 percent of households still earned an average of $349,000 in 2010.

Paul Geitner:

For most Europeans, almost nothing is more prized than their four to six weeks of guaranteed annual vacation leave. But it was not clear just how sacrosanct that time off was until Thursday, when Europe's highest court ruled that workers who happened to get sick on vacation were legally entitled to take another vacation.

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Valve's Gabe Newell:

Each developer's responsible for thinking about how to measure and optimize customer satisfaction.

Atul Gawande:

The difference between triumph and defeat, you'll find, isn't about willingness to take risks. It's about mastery of rescue.

Jennifer Tilly:

Sometimes I'll go easy on some really old guy, and then he just really sticks it to me a half-hour later. He's really ungracious about it, and I think, Oooh, I should have never let him live. I should have snuffed him out when I had the chance.

John Flowers:

The way it works is, we give away the product for free, then lure advertisers with the promise of connecting them to millions of people who hate to pay for things. Amazingly, it works.

Charles Wheelan:

Some of your worst days lie ahead. If you are going to do anything worthwhile, you will face periods of grinding self-doubt and failure. Be prepared to work through them ... one year after college graduation, I had no job, less than $500 in assets, and I was living with an elderly retired couple. The only difference between when I graduated and today is that now no one can afford to retire.

Nick Foster:

Making things is hard. Really hard. Don't let anyone tell you anything different.

John Marbach:

Stop building your idea. Start solving a problem.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Michael Braun, the former chief of operations for the D.E.A., told me a story about the construction of a high-tech fence along a stretch of border in Arizona. "They erect this fence," he said, "only to go out there a few days later and discover that these guys have a catapult, and they're flinging hundred-pound bales of marijuana over to the other side." He paused and looked at me for a second. "A catapult," he repeated. "We've got the best fence money can buy, and they counter us with a 2,500-year-old technology."

Shawn Henry, FBI executive assistant director:

We're not winning.

I don't see how we ever come out of this without changes in technology or changes in behavior, because with the status quo, it's an unsustainable model. Unsustainable in that you never get ahead, never become secure, never have a reasonable expectation of privacy or security.

Clay Johnson:

Your clicks have consequences.

James A. Lewis:

There's a kind of willful desire not to admit how bad things are.

George Hotz:

If they were that good, they wouldn't have got caught.

Richard Bejtlich:

The median number of days between the start of an intrusion and its detection was 416.

Nicholas Kristof:

Antibiotic-resistant infections kill more Americans annually than AIDS.

Tom Vanderbilt:

If a pattern can't be observed, it probably just means you haven't looked long enough.

Benjamin Sandofsky:

There are no silver bullets to solve essential complexity. Trying to abstract away essential complexity only makes things more complex.

Colin Powell:

Tell me what you know.

Tell me what you don't know.

Then tell me what you think.

Always distinguish which is which.

Graham Morehead:

Their numbers were better than ever. Their lives were hell.

Carl Honore:

Our addiction to speed is backfiring on us.

Speed becomes a form of denial. It's a way of running away from those deeper, tangled problems. Instead of focusing on questions like who am I, and what is my role here, it all becomes a superficial to-do list.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi:

JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI is the story of 85 year-old Jiro Ono, considered by many to be the world's greatest sushi chef. He is the proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a 10-seat, sushi-only restaurant inauspiciously located in a Tokyo subway station. ... For most of his life, Jiro has been mastering the art of making sushi, but even at his age he sees himself still striving for perfection, working from sunrise to well beyond sunset to taste every piece of fish; meticulously train his employees; and carefully mold and finesse the impeccable presentation of each sushi creation.

Elizabeth Kolbert:

Lots of people offer the notion that parenthood will make them happy. Here the evidence is, sadly, against them. Research shows that people who have children are no more satisfied with their lives than people who don't. If anything, the balance tips the other way: parents are less happy.

We regard pleasure and pain differently. Pleasure missed out on by the nonexistent doesn't count as a harm. Yet suffering avoided counts as a good, even when the recipient is a nonexistent one.

Ben Hammersley:

We expect everything. And we expect it on our own terms.

Om Malik:

The biggest mistake we make in life is that we end up spending most of it trying to be who we are supposed to be instead of who we want to be.

Marge Simpson:

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

Tim Kreider:

Life is too short to be busy.

INRIX:

As part of the 2011 Full Year Scorcard Analysis, INRIX has analyzed the most congested corridors in the United States by metro for the year. Here, we present the analysis of the 150+ most congested corridors with reports of traffic congestion during peak periods as well as in the worst hour of the week. In addition, there are comparisons and trends from 2010 to 2011.

Renault:

2012, the iconic Alpine A110 turns 50. To celebrate the event, Renault has designed a concept car: Renault Alpine A110-50. dedicated to performance and driving pleasure.

Tim Kreider:

It isn't generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the I.C.U. or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs who tell you how busy they are; what those people are is not busy but tired. Exhausted. Dead on their feet. It's almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed: work and obligations they've taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they've "encouraged" their kids to participate in. They're busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they're addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I can't help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn't a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn't matter.

The Editors of n+1:

Systems of accreditation do not assess merit; merit is a fiction created by systems of accreditation. Like the market for skin care products, the market for credentials is inexhaustible: as the bachelor's degree becomes democratized, the master's degree becomes mandatory for advancement. Our elaborate, expensive system of higher education is first and foremost a system of stratification , and only secondly -- and very dimly -- a system for imparting knowledge.