Today, purchases of computer hardware and software account for half of all capital spending by businesses.

What does it mean to be part of the first generation coming of age steeped in a virtual world seemingly outside parental control?

The generation that came of age in the ’80s, as the VCR was becoming a staple, is especially prone to VHS nostalgia, a manifestation of the broader retro culture that has accounted for untold hours of programming on VH1.

Igor Jablokov says cellular companies tell him in meetings that two-thirds of their teenage customers have either sent or read a text message while behind the wheel.

If Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan -- a Camry, say -- to the ultra-efficient Prius.

Sheryl Crow: "Honestly, I don’t know what record sales mean anymore."

Lenny Kravitz: "Music on the radio is in a very bad state because people are not really musicians, not really writers or singers in a lot of cases. Everything is geared toward selling, and the music is like McDonald’s: tastes good going down but then you’re like, why did I do it?"

By all appearances, female sperm whales are terrible size queens.

His ennui is almost French in its intensity: “He felt weak at the thought of reading another story about vampires having sex with other vampires. He tried to struggle through Lovecraft pastiches, but at the first painfully serious reference to the Elder Gods, he felt some important part of him going numb inside, the way a foot or a hand will go to sleep when the circulation is cut off. He feared the part of him being numbed was his soul.” I think we’ve all been there.

“Never get into a wrestling match with a pig,” Senator John McCain said in New Hampshire this month after reporters asked him about Mr. Romney. “You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”

Insiders are now behaving more bullishly than at any time since November 2002, the month after the end of the 2000-2002 bear market.

Global demand for meat has multiplied in recent years, encouraged by growing affluence and nourished by the proliferation of huge, confined animal feeding operations. These assembly-line meat factories consume enormous amounts of energy, pollute water supplies, generate significant greenhouse gases and require ever-increasing amounts of corn, soy and other grains, a dependency that has led to the destruction of vast swaths of the world’s tropical rain forests.

You may view “Untraceable,” as I do, as a repugnant example of the voyeurism it pretends to condemn. Or you may stand back and see it as a cleverly conceived, slickly executed genre movie that ranks somewhere between “Seven” and the “Saw” movies in sadistic ingenuity.

The way the series is structured, viewers can tune in according to their interest level.

If the South Carolina result buoyed the Obama team, it left Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign facing a new set of questions. Her advisers’ steady attacks on Mr. Obama appeared to prove fruitless, if not counterproductive, and the attack-dog role of former President Bill Clinton seemed to have backfired.

At this time of year, Mr. Clinton could be in Davos, Switzerland, mingling with his fellow global elites at the annual economic summit. Instead, he is working like a precinct captain in places called Barnwell and Walterboro and Kingstree.

Last year, Mr. Gore accepted free merchandise that was worth $15,245, more than double the value of products accepted by any of Apple’s five other outside directors, Apple’s latest proxy shows.

John Shirley’s great subject is the terrible ease with which we modern Americans have learned to look away from pain and suffering. The opening line of his novel “Demons” states the theme succinctly: “It’s amazing what you can get used to.” In “The Sewing Room,” one of the new stories in the present collection, an ordinary woman discovers, to her horror, that her husband is a serial murderer, and we discover, to ours, that she can live with it.

“The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should,” he said last month, according to The Boston Globe. “I’ve got Greenspan’s book.”

When you see the market gyrating wildly downward and hear some pundit saying it’s because of this or that data or this paradigm or that ratio, remember trader realism. The traders move the market any way they want, any way they think they can make money, and then they whisper a reason to journalists later in the day. Then the journalists print it or say it on television, and the amateurs believe it. And the traders snicker.

The current slowdown is layered on top of deep-rooted economic problems that are not addressed by a stimulus package. If the nation’s leaders do not start showing the political will to do more than dole out popular tax breaks during an election year, short-term fixes could actually make the long-term problems worse.

Lisa Germinsky, 33, a screenwriter who lives in Gramercy, has just begun to trim back. “My boyfriend and I, we were talking and he’s just like doom and gloom, ‘impending recession,’ his stocks dropping,” she said. “And I’m a freelancer, so I’m like, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”

“These are going to be tough economic times, very tough, and when I think about it, I want somebody who is going to hit the ground running."

“The great shame is that people are often never as good or as bad as they are held up to be."

The average top executive at a Standard & Poor’s 500 company now makes 550 times what the average worker makes.

Ultimately, the sudden loss of a young luminary offers a powerful message, not only about death but about life choices.

“I know a lot of car thieves who are now Taliban emirs,” he said.

The lessons of legal realism have always been uppermost in my mind when I think about law or about anything else important: Stated reasons are often not the real reasons.

Today the most remarkable young people are the social entrepreneurs, those who see a problem in society and roll up their sleeves to address it in new ways.

"You’ve inadvertently radicalized a bunch of otherwise mellow people."

Mr. Bush says without amnesty, the government won’t get cooperation in the future. We don’t buy it. The real aim is to make sure the full story of the illegal wiretapping never comes out in court.

At a time when so many problems have arisen outside the limits of existing federal insurance programs, we need to do more than update the programs for inflation. We need to consider the fundamental principles on which they were based, stress-test them for today’s environment and consider extending them in creative ways.

“You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett wrote in a letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders six years ago. Unfortunately, this crisis’s outgoing tide has exposed some of the nation’s most esteemed institutions. Naked truths like these are never a pretty sight. And even after the tide comes back in, they are not likely to be soon forgotten.

Recent intelligence analysis indicated that Al Qaeda was now operating in the tribal areas with an impunity similar to the freedom that it had in Afghanistan before the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

In Nakuru, furious mobs rule the streets, burning homes, brutalizing people and expelling anyone not in their ethnic group, all with complete impunity. On Saturday, hundreds of men prowled a section of the city with six-foot iron bars, poisoned swords, clubs, knives and crude circumcision tools. Boys carried gladiator-style shields and women strutted around with sharpened sticks. The police were nowhere to be found.

The bank’s management has come under increasing pressure from French officials to provide a more detailed accounting of how Mr. Kerviel could have racked up such enormous losses by himself, over a year, without raising any red flags among either his supervisors or the bank’s internal auditors. Mr. Bouton described Mr. Kerviel’s elaborate efforts to hide his activities as being like a “mutating virus.” ... Within six hours, Mr. Kerviel’s losses swelled by 1.4 billion euros.

Pakistani former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated in a suicide attack.

BBC NEWS | World | South Asia | Benazir Bhutto killed in attack

In a private session with lawmakers, ... Mr. Bush conceded the war is "sapping our soul," but he said he intended to pursue his plan to send more troops to Iraq.

America will be a more secure country once it discards the notion that secrecy is equal to strength.

If you consider the motivation and methods behind the attacks of September 11th to be mainly a puzzle, for instance, then the logical response is to increase the collection of intelligence, recruit more spies, add to the volume of information we have about Al Qaeda. If you consider September 11th a mystery, though, you’d have to wonder whether adding to the volume of information will only make things worse. You’d want to improve the analysis within the intelligence community; you’d want more thoughtful and skeptical people with the skills to look more closely at what we already know about Al Qaeda. You’d want to send the counterterrorism team from the CIA on a golfing trip twice a month with the counterterrorism teams from the FBI and the NSA and the Defense Department, so they could get to know one another and compare notes.

Dive into the sea, or stay away.
-- Nizar Qabbani

This is no less than a clash of civilizations -- the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival.

“We’re all flabbergasted,” one European diplomat said of the report generally.

The country is drifting "towards a warlord state, along a Basra model, with power devolved to local militias, gangs, tribes, and power-brokers, with a purely nominal central state."

“No one can stop it,” Abu Ali said. “Corruption runs from top to bottom.”

"We wanted the best, but it turned out as always."
-- Viktor Chernomyrdin, Russian prime minister, 1992-1998; now, a billionaire oligarch

"Mom, we killed women on the street today. We killed kids on bikes. We had no choice."

Their plans may have been dreamy. But at least, they had plans.

He called her "an incompetent fool," but said he would vote for her anyway.

Our first sight of death was a man and his wife both ripped open and dismembered, their intestines strewn across shattered boxes of candy bars.

Many people will use this terrible tragedy as an excuse to put through a political agenda other than my own. This tawdry abuse of human suffering for political gain sickens me to the core of my being.

"Children in the back seat, lower suspicion, we let it move through," Barbero said. "They parked the vehicle, the adults run out and detonate it with the children in the back."

We sign these treaties to protect us from ourselves, not from them.

This change looks reasonable at first, but it could create huge long-term security risks for the United States.

Romney is fond of PowerPoint and terms like "strategic audits" and "wow moments."

People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.

He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.

"We will disrupt their workday with a mildly offensive blinking neon light!"
"Death to America!!!!"
"Death to America!!!!"

For many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

Back in the day, I was in Jersey. I don't know if it was the center of the BBS world; it was probably the ass-end of it, like it was of everything else. But it felt like the center.

Social networks conceal a trivialization of interaction ... at a time when we need discussion and argument to be more effective than ever.

Call it stalking, procrastinating or friend collecting, it doesn't build real connections.

... Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs.

What was once the mark of utter uncoolness, a veritable byword of selling out, has become the norm.

What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from traveling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich ... And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to the third-class passengers and mean to the second-class ones, become lavish in dealing with first-class customers. Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

It's the best kind of pop album imaginable.

Rick Rubin says that the future of the industry is a subscription model.

Gray matter is the new black of the hip social scene.

Cable news has a habit of treating viewers like children on a long car trip.

Everyone else started with the bloody diarrhea. Maybe that was the wrong way to think about it.

In my opinion, the double helix is much too simple to be the secret of life. ... Replication is clean while metabolism is messy. By excluding messiness, they excluded the essence of life.

Failure is an essential part of the process. "The way you say this is: 'Please fail very quickly -- so that you can try again'," says Mr Schmidt.

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

Any good programmer in a large organization is going to be at odds with it, because organizations are designed to prevent what programmers strive for.

“Many times the problems you see that you try to correct are not the root causes of the problem,” he said.

"A lot of people who are not conventional are not serious. But the real breakthroughs in science are made by serious thinkers who are willing to work on research areas that people think are too controversial or too implausible."

“Think of the kids you don’t have,” Mr. Levchin quoted them as saying. “Think of your unborn grandkids.”

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over.

Ninety percent of the time things will turn out worse than you expect. The other 10 percent of the time you had no right to expect so much.

"This enemy is better networked than we are.”

I predict that the domestication of biotechnology will dominate our lives during the next fifty years at least as much as the domestication of computers has dominated our lives during the previous fifty years.

"The social dimension turns out to be as essential as the scientific."