Robert Wright:

ISIS is here. And it's here, in part, because we got all freaked out about Al Qaeda and overreacted to it. And now we're getting freaked out about ISIS.

Charles Simic:

"Things will never be the same in this country", people kept saying after September 11, and that has proved to be true. What hasn't changed is our belief that we can eradicate evil in the world.

Adam Gopnik:

Do you have the courage to embrace an inarguable and obvious truth when it might cost you something to do so? A politician who fails this test is not high-minded or neutral; he or she is just craven, and shouldn't be trusted with power.

Nicole Hensley:

Kermit Elementary School officials called it a threat when the 9-year-old boy, Aiden Steward, in a playful act of make-believe, told a classmate he could make him disappear with a ring forged in fictional Middle Earth's Mount Doom.

Megha Rajagopalan:

The southern Chinese city of Shenzhen suspended 14 police officers and put a police chief under investigation on Tuesday on suspicion of feasting on an endangered giant salamander, state media reported.

Abu Ahmed:

This can't be stopped now. This is out of the control of any man.

Paul Graham:

When I encounter a startup with a lame-sounding idea, I ask "What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?"

Alastair Humphreys:

You must be willing to accept that things do not come about instantly. Too many people set the cart before the horse, seeking the honour and recognition but without first completing the hazardous journey on low wages in the bitter cold through long hours of complete darkness.

Horace Dediu:

Whether your approach and innovation sustains the hegemony or changes it will largely depend on your business model being asymmetric to the incumbent. Determining what is and isn't symmetric should be the first step in your analysis.

Richard Hamming:

Once you get your courage up and believe that you can do important problems, then you can. If you think you can't, almost surely you are not going to.

Decius:

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

Michael Haneke:

What in people's upbringing makes them willing to surrender their responsibilities?

Emrys Westacott:

The real danger isn't transparency but asymmetry.

James Fallows:

As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not.

Elizabeth D. Samet:

The invocation of veteran status as shorthand for some particular quality or capacity ... seems, among other things, to be a symptom of the current civilian-military gap ...

Matt Richtel:

To these vets, thanking soldiers for their service symbolizes the ease of sending a volunteer army to wage war at great distance -- physically, spiritually, economically. It raises questions of the meaning of patriotism, shared purpose and, pointedly, what you're supposed to say to those who put their lives on the line and are uncomfortable about being thanked for it.

Kyle Steiner:

You know, I didn't have to do shit. I didn't have to go in the army. I didn't have to become airborne infantry. I didn't have to do any of that. But I did, you know?

And, that comment, "you did what you had to do," just drives me insane.

Because is that what God's going to say? "You did what you had to do, good job"? Punch you on the shoulder and fucking say, "welcome to heaven," you know? I don't think so.

Michael Haneke:

The willingness to follow ideological Pied Pipers arises everywhere and in every age. All that's needed are misery, humiliation and hopelessness, and the longing for deliverance swells up. Anyone who promises salvation will find followers, and it doesn't really matter whether theirs is a right- or a left-wing ideology, a political or a religious doctrine of salvation.

Akim Reinhardt:

We build ideas like large, intricate Rube Goldberg contraptions. We're desperate to know that we caught the mouse because we built a proper trap. We're distraught by the prospect that we are the mice and the mice are us and every living thing dies, whether in a trap or in an open field or in the talons of bird or in the wreckage of a car or in a hospital. I don't write this because I'm trying to convince anyone. I don't care if you agree with me or not. Whether you do or don't doesn't matter in the least. Nothing matters. Rather, I write these words because the absence of truth is the only truth I know. Because meaninglessness is the only thing I have. And because today I just can't bring myself to pretend otherwise.

Deb Chachra:

I wonder if Boston Dynamics videos include people kicking their Big Dogs precisely to elicit this human sympathy towards what is, ultimately, weaponry.

Kashmir Hill:

This may be the first time police had to respond because of a robot-on-robot threat of violence.

D. K.:

Perhaps what gun control needs is a few advocates who are a little more visibly familiar with the sheer fun of holding a pistol and pulling the trigger.

Humera Khan:

More often than not, an agent is rewarded for catching a terrorist rather than for preventing and dissuading someone from becoming one.

The Economist:

The best time to start tackling future crimes is now.

Steven Bellovin:

I want to know how to think about the problem. We don't even have the right words. We can't make our systems Andromedan-proof if we don't know what we need to protect against them.

Ben Beeson, a partner at insurance broker Lockton:

The costs are becoming so great that we really need $1bn policies in light of the threats we are facing. The question is how do we get there and price risk, especially when the risks are changing every day.

Tom Streithorst:

The American military is deeply committed to force protection, to not losing soldiers. Captains tell you proudly their primary goal is to get through the tour without any fatalities. This is an admirable sign of human decency, but it is not particularly bellicose. It is impossible to imagine William the Conqueror, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, or Patton focusing above all else on not losing soldiers. Historically, officers are happy to use their men as cannon fodder if it will help them achieve their objectives.

Elizabeth D. Samet, professor at West Point:

We were all of us ... inhabiting an Odyssey in which the hardest struggle comes after the battle has been won.

[My cadets] are wondering whether they have what it takes to be lieutenants, while I'm thinking about what kinds of generals they might make.

Adam Gopnik:

Defiantly unapologetic irrationalism is, sad to say, still a winning strategy for power, all over the world. But we pay a huge price for its successes.

Jan Chipchase:

What does your learning curve look like? Where are you on the curve? And where do you want to be?

Decius:

Be careful what you get good at.

Jan Chipchase:

The money you turn down defines you as much as the work you take on.

Penelope Trunk:

I try to celebrate each time I give something up, because then I know I'm a little closer to meeting my goals.

Jan Chipchase:

Be your own harshest critic, and deflate hype wherever you see it.

Mike Tyson:

I've learned that when people congratulate me, that's when I focus on my flaws. That way I don't allow my narcissism to fly sky-high and allow me to think that I can act out without any consequences.

Jan Chipchase:

Where do you want to work? Who do you want to work with? And what is the minimal viable infrastructure that is required to make it happen?

Decius:

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

Charles Simic:

What Czeslaw Milosz said of the last century is unfortunately already true of this one: Woe to those who think they can save themselves without taking part in a tragedy.

James Fallows:

As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not.

Charles Simic:

"Things will never be the same in this country", people kept saying after September 11, and that has proved to be true. What hasn't changed is our belief that we can eradicate evil in the world.

Graeme Wood:

To call them un-Islamic appears, to me, to invite them into an argument that they would win. If they had been froth-spewing maniacs, I might be able to predict that their movement would burn out as the psychopaths detonated themselves or became drone-splats, one by one. But these men spoke with an academic precision that put me in mind of a good graduate seminar. I even enjoyed their company, and that frightened me as much as anything else.

It is ready to cheer its own near-obliteration, and to remain confident, even when surrounded, that it will receive divine succor if it stays true to the Prophetic model. Ideological tools may convince some potential converts that the group's message is false, and military tools can limit its horrors. But for an organization as impervious to persuasion as the Islamic State, few measures short of these will matter, and the war may be a long one, even if it doesn't last until the end of time.

James Fallows:

The "easy" part of dealing with ISIS is agreeing on its horror. The difficult part is thinking ahead five steps, about what the use of military power can and cannot do.

Adam Curtis:

Events come and go like waves of a fever, leaving us confused and uncertain. Those in power tell stories to help us make sense of the complexity of reality, but those stories are increasingly unconvincing and hollow. This is a film about why those stories have stopped making sense, and how that led us in the West to become a dangerous and destructive force in the world.

Ian Parker, on Jony Ive:

In our conversations, his manner could sometimes be unsettling for the way it combined the tender attentiveness of a suicide-prevention volunteer -- "I was ever so lucky"; "I do hope you have a good flight" -- with a keenness to move the conversation from the particular to the general; his replies, searching for the safe ground of a previously expressed thought, often looped and hedged, or drifted off into a sigh.

Alice Gregory:

Techniques that are encouraged include validation ("What a tough situation"); "tentafiers" ("Do you mind if I ask you ... "); strength identification ("You're a great brother for being so worried about him"); and empathetic responses ("It sounds like you're feeling anxious because of all these rumors"). The implicit theory is that in a conversation people are naturally inclined to fill silences.

Bruce Feiler:

Our instinct is often to say to a friend who's suffering, "Let me know if there's anything you need." While well meaning, this gesture unintentionally shifts the obligation to the aggrieved. Instead of offering "anything," just do something.

Clancy Martin:

Don't worry so much about ferreting out the truth. Take care of each other instead.

William Lynn:

Google's market value, nearly $400 billion, is more than double that of General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon put together. And with the $60 billion it has on hand, Google could buy all the outstanding shares of any one of them.

The combined R & D budgets of five of the largest U.S. defense contractors (about $4 billion, according to the research firm Capital Alpha Partners) amount to less than half of what companies such as Microsoft or Toyota spend on R & D in a single year.

Kate Brannen:

In Silicon Valley, Peter Newell said, "problems are currency." The challenge, he added, is that the Pentagon does a "crappy job" explaining those challenges to the bright minds likely to be most energized about trying to solve them.

At the Pentagon, "they make rules designed to save them a dime and end up wasting a million dollars in the process," he added.

Anthony Cordesman:

The end result is a military debate that borders on strategic infantilism. No one defines their terms, their objectives, the cost-benefits they expect, or any other aspect of a real strategy. The debate is essentially meaningless because no one states what they mean -- or in most cases seems to bother to have asked themselves what they mean before they have taken a position.

Rosa Brooks:

When did we come to believe that crucial national security decisions are best made by people too tired to think straight?

Daniel J. Levitin:

One of the first things we lose [when multitasking] is impulse control. This rapidly spirals into a depleted state in which, after making lots of insignificant decisions, we can end up making truly bad decisions about something important.

Rikki Rogers:

At the end of your day -- every day! -- write down two things that you did that someone else could have done for you. They might be administrative tasks, housework, or simply to-do items that someone else could have accomplished just as easily. The next day, delegate those items.

Richard Hamming:

The day your vision, what you think needs to be done, is bigger than what you can do single-handedly, then you have to move toward management. And the bigger the vision is, the farther in management you have to go.

Jony Ive:

You go from something that you feel very protective of, and you feel great ownership of, and suddenly it's not yours anymore, and it's everybody else's. And it's a very -- I think the word 'traumatic' is probably overstated, but it's a really significant point in time.

Lorde / Ella:

the feeling of something very solitary that i had worked on spinning around and around further away from me, becoming someone else's, everyone's.

Penelope Trunk:

The thing that gets you past the career plateau of a high-performer is a big idea.

Evan Ackerman:

Big ideas are valuable, especially technological big ideas, and sharing your big ideas with the government without any clear and tangible benefit is a lot to ask. We're not suggesting that the DoD is going to take your idea and run with it or anything like that; it's more like, without a well-defined upside, why would anyone bother?

Johannes (Hanno) Bock:

It would be an interesting (and time consuming) project to take a package like PHP and check for all the security vulnerabilities whether they are fixed in the latest packages in Debian Squeeze/Wheezy, all Red Hat Enterprise versions and other long term support systems. PHP is probably more interesting than browsers, because the high profile targets for these vulnerabilities are servers. What worries me: I'm pretty sure some people already do that. They just won't tell you and me, instead they'll write their exploits and sell them to repressive governments or botnet operators.

Akiko Busch:

Invisibility can be about finding a sense of fit with the immediate landscape, be it social, cultural or environmental. It can be about adaptability and the recognition that assertiveness may not always be in our best interest. Most of all, it can reflect a sense of vigilance, a sensitivity to and respect for external conditions.

Escaping notice need not be about complacent isolation, mindless conformity or humiliating anonymity. When circumstance confers invisibility upon us, perhaps it is something to appreciate and even welcome, as some iteration of the small imprint, low-impact living it makes sense to aspire to. Or possibly as a more profound poise, a fuller appreciation for our place in the greater scheme of things.

Ian Parker, on Jony Ive:

His manner suggests the burden of being fully appreciated.