Diego Gambetta:

Given the huge political costs if an attack of the scale of 9/11 were to be repeated, it makes sense for policymakers to be overzealous in issuing public warnings.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, of California:

They will come after us, and I think we need to prevent an attack wherever we can.

Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa:

If it can happen in Paris, it can happen in New York again, or Washington, D.C.

Alison Smale:

Even as governments are ramping up their counterterrorism efforts, they are igniting a growing debate about whether they are going too far, too fast, and are at risk of sacrificing civil liberties as they scramble to intensify security. The trade-offs are not always easy to discern ...

Samuel Moyn:

"It ought not to be beyond the intelligence of even the most hidebound local politicians to see the benefits of imaginative compromise," Tony Judt says. Yet so far, it has been.

Michael S. Schmidt:

The revelation by the D.E.A. shows how tactics that began as a response to terrorism have become part of the government's approach to more routine crimes.

Senator Patrick Leahy, of Vermont:

I am deeply concerned about this kind of suspicionless intrusion into American's privacy in any context, but it is particularly troubling when done for routine criminal investigations.

Mathangi Krishnamurthy:

Things can rarely be erased these days. We leave signs of our presence everywhere and all signs are under observation. There is no starting over. Our histories are in code, and all our secret pleasures open to scrutiny. We must not write anymore except when things we write are not worth scrutiny.

David Bernstein:

There's no way to test the merit of ideas unless someone is willing to criticize them, sometimes harshly.

Kelly Fitzsimmons, co-founder of the Hypervoice Consortium:

What would it mean to have a corpus of conversations after there is regime change, and a new government doesn't like what you said?

David Cole:

Increasingly, it's not clear that your vote matters unless you're also willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to support your preferences. This is a game played by, and for, the wealthy.

James Bessen:

Balance will be difficult to restore, given that money will likely remain a fixture of the U.S. political system. The cost of running for Congress has increased by more than 500 percent since 1984, and spending by registered Washington lobbyists has soared, more than doubling between 1998 and 2008. Efforts to curtail lobbying have largely failed, with the Supreme Court restricting legislation intended to rein in campaign spending.

David Cole:

According to the Brennan Center report, over the five years since these decisions, super PACs have spent more than one billion dollars on federal election campaigns. And because these organizations are free of any limits, they have proved to be magnets for those who have the resources to spend lavishly to further their interests. About 60 percent of that billion dollars has come from just 195 people. Those 195 individuals have only one vote each, but does anyone believe that their combined expenditure of over $600 million does not give them disproportionate influence on the politicians they have supported?

Jim Tankersley:

The median prime-age American male -- 25 to 54 years old -- earns less today than he did in 1966, adjusted for inflation. After decades of social and economic progress, the median prime-age woman earns less now than she did in 2000. The typical two-parent American family works nearly two more days per week, full time, than it did in 1979 -- but earns less per hour, in real dollars. The Federal Reserve calculates that the typical household has less wealth than it did in 1989. Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman reported recently that 90 percent of U.S. households are worth less today than they were in 1987.

And yet America's total personal income nearly doubled over the past 25 years, and inflation-adjusted incomes nearly tripled for the top 5 percent of U.S. earners.

Werner Herzog:

Learn to read the inner essence of a landscape.

Rowan Simpson:

All it takes to lose confidence in the quality of what you're reading is one story on a topic you know a lot about. You can extrapolate from there.

The White House:

American companies are also leaders in protecting privacy ...

James Bessen:

The root of the problem is the corrosive influence of money in politics.

Diego Gambetta:

If lobbies and conspiracies had an effect on deciding the war on Iraq, this was because the new strategic mindset was so manipulable. It attracted reasoning that was orthogonal to the central issue.

Devlin Barrett:

Saied Kashani said the DEA took a law originally meant to authorize specific, targeted requests for information from drug companies and turned it into a general sweep of millions of Americans' phone records.

Peter Beinart:

[These] actions were not "contrary to who we are." They were a manifestation of who we are. And the more we acknowledge that, the better our chances of becoming something different in the years to come.

John Boehner:

We live in a dangerous country, and we get reminded every week of the dangers that are out there.

Ivan Sukhov:

Dark storm clouds have descended and there is no sign of light on the horizon.

Samuel Moyn:

Ours remains an era of forever war, one that both American liberals and conservatives agree to go on fighting, while restricting their wrangling to how best to justify it legally.

Dan Geer:

Things that need no appropriations are outside the system of checks and balances.

Mujib Mashal:

In private, U.S. officials admit they don't know how much they've spent on the Afghan war.

Matthieu Aikins:

We stare at each other for a moment, and Mirza Khan gives a chuckle. He shakes his head in amazement. A future hundred grand sitting in the living room of a guy who doesn't have plumbing, electricity or furniture. Someone between him and that junkie is clearly making a killing.

The Economist:

Part of the ingenuity of the schemes, part of the chutzpah, is the way they mix subterfuge with respect for the letter of the law. This was a heist, but a perfectly legal one.

Benedict Evans:

Though the Royal Navy ended WW2 with 55 aircraft carriers of various form factors, ultimately carriers for squadrons of jets were so expensive that the UK economy could not support building a fleet of them and (for this and other reasons) ceded naval supremacy to the US Navy. This is a common theme, incidentally -- 'disruptive' military technology has almost always been more expensive, not cheaper, and the higher cost tended to be as disruptive to the broader environment as the technology itself.

Matt Trevithick and Daniel Seckman:

Nothing conveys the gravity of this war like seeing a drone descend missile-less minutes before another rises into the sky fully loaded.

Paul Graham:

If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for.

Rustin Cohle:

I can't say the job made me this way. More like me being this way made me right for the job. I used to think about it more, but you reach a certain age you know who you are.

Werner Herzog:

Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey.

Get used to the bear behind you.

Michael Moorcock:

I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas.

Robin Sloan:

I wear my own skin and it fights me every day.

Christopher Orr:

Abel resists, insisting on doing things the "right" way. The only thing he values more than his success is his integrity.

Alice Walker:

Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Nicholas Kristof:

Poultry Science journal has calculated that if humans grew at the same rate as modern chickens, a human would weigh 660 pounds by the age of eight weeks.

Sarah Koenig:

We don't seem to be the most patient country in the world.

Jane Brody:

A recent review of 15 studies involving 163,796 births found that, compared with babies delivered vaginally, those born by cesarean section were 26 percent more likely to be overweight and 22 percent more likely to be obese as adults.

Nolan Feeney:

Approximately 71% of the 34 million 17-to-24-year-olds in the U.S. would not qualify for military service because of reasons related to health, physical appearance and educational background, according to the Pentagon.

Lindsay Cohen:

Public transit in Seattle has gone to the dogs.

Commuters in Belltown report seeing a Black Labrador riding the bus alone in recent weeks.

"She gets on in front of her house and she gets off at the dog park, three or four stops later," said Jeff Young, who owns the dog. "She knows what she's doing."

This American Life:

Lulu Miller tells the story of Daniel Kish, who's blind, but can navigate the world by clicking with his tongue. This gives him so much information about what's around him, he does all sorts of things most blind people don't. Most famously, he rides a bike.

Donna St. George:

It was a one-mile walk home from a Silver Spring park on Georgia Avenue on a Saturday afternoon. But what the parents saw as a moment of independence for their 10-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter, they say authorities viewed much differently.

Danielle and Alexander Meitiv say they are being investigated for neglect for the Dec. 20 trek -- in a case they say reflects a clash of ideas about how safe the world is and whether parents are free to make their own choices about raising their children.

Andrew Keatts:

The idea is to identify people likely to commit serious crimes, and create an opportunity to arrest them for something else before that happens.

James Comey:

In 2003 there were 6.3 billion human beings on the earth and 500 million devices connected to the Internet. In 2010 there were 6.8 billion people on the earth and 12.5 billion devices connected to the Internet.

Brian Solis:

By 2020, the number of devices connected to the Internet is expected to exceed 40 billion.

Doc Searls and David Weinberger:

An organ-by-organ body snatch of the Internet is already well underway.

Barack Obama:

If we don't put in place the kind of architecture that can prevent these attacks from taking place, this is not just going to be affecting movies, this is going to be affecting our entire economy in ways that are extraordinarily significant.

Straw Man:

Money for me, databases for you.

Diego Gambetta:

We need to consider two questions about the rationality of this mindset: the first concerns the process of arriving at it; the second concerns the consequences of adopting it.

Nicholas Kristof:

Torture a single chicken and you risk arrest. Abuse hundreds of thousands of chickens for their entire lives? That's agribusiness.

Andrew Keatts:

When does smart policing become a police state?

Douglasville Deputy Chief Gary E. Sparks:

It's better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Chris Betz:

Forces often seek to undermine and disrupt technology and people, attempting to weaken the very devices and services people have come to depend on and trust.

Molly Wood:

Think twice about what you connect to your network.

James Comey:

My goal is to urge our fellow citizens to participate in a conversation as a country about where we are, and where we want to be, with respect to the authority of law enforcement.

David Cameron:

In our country, do we want to allow a means of communication between people which ... we cannot read?

David Cole:

It is disappointing, if not surprising, that they see a need for public debate only when new technologies may impair their ability to monitor us, and not when such technologies enhance their monitoring.

Poul-Henning Kamp:

The reason HTTP/2.0 does not improve privacy is that the big corporate backers have built their business model on top of the lack of privacy.

Maciej Ceglowski:

Surveillance as a business model is the only thing that makes a site like Facebook possible.

Metafilter Wisdom:

If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.

Steven Johns:

Gogo Inflight Internet seems to believe that they are justified in performing a man-in-the-middle attack on their users. It was [recently] revealed through the FCC that Gogo partnered with government officials to produce "capabilities to accommodate law enforcement interests" that go beyond those outlined under federal law.

Teju Cole:

It is necessary to understand that free speech and other expressions of liberté are already in crisis in Western societies; the crisis was not precipitated by three deranged gunmen.

We may not be able to attend to each outrage in every corner of the world, but we should at least pause to consider how it is that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent deaths are more meaningful, and more worthy of commemoration, than others.

ADM Mike Rogers:

The entire world is watching how we as a nation are going to respond to this.

Jean-Charles Brisard, head of the French Center for Analysis of Terrorism:

It's a problem of resources.

James A. Lewis:

The real issue is lack of trust in the government.

Mike Loukides:

In the future, we will be increasingly reliant on systems that we can't necessarily trust to do our bidding, and that fail in nondeterministic ways.

David Foster Wallace:

What if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don't even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?

Dr. Laura Elizabeth Pinto and Dr. Selena Nemorin:

The purpose of this article is to explore theoretical and conceptual concerns about the popularity and widespread educational use of The Elf on the Shelf in light of the contemporary literature on play and panoptic surveillance.

Peter Gray:

One game of their own devising was modeled after the camp's daily roll call and was called klepsi-klepsi, a common term for stealing. One playmate was blindfolded; then one of the others would step forward and hit him hard on the face; and then, with blindfold removed, the one who had been hit had to guess, from facial expressions or other evidence, who had hit him. To survive at Auschwitz, one had to be an expert at bluffing -- for example, about stealing bread or about knowing of someone's escape or resistance plans. Klepsi-klepsi may have been practice for that skill.

Robert Pogue Harrison:

In his Letter to the Romans, Saint Paul wrote of the malaise of the earth: "the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time." That creaturely groaning has gotten a lot louder of late, and if God indeed loves his creatures enough to open heaven to them, it is highly likely that, when our pets get there, they will find themselves on their own.

Sjon:

Maybe we lost something when we started classifying nature by the difference between things rather than what we have in common.