Timothy Noah:

Violent crime has fallen by 44 percent in America over the past two decades, but during that same period the prison population has more than doubled.

Stephen L. Carter:

Officials who fail to take into account the obvious fact that the laws they're so eager to pass will be enforced at the point of a gun cannot fairly be described as public servants.

Frank Bruni:

More than 30,000 Americans die from gunshots every year. Anyone looking for an epidemic to freak out about can find one right there.

Alice Goffman:

People on both sides of the aisle and on both sides of the courtroom now acknowledge that the criminal justice system needs a major overhaul. After four decades of zero tolerance and getting tough on crime, we seem poised for change. Can we seize the moment?

Christopher Jencks:

While the police win most of the battles, they are not winning the war.

Eli Saslow:

Border Patrol agent Elias Pompa performed his work best, he thought, in the rare moments when he could ... manage to feel nothing at all.

Lawrence Lessig:

Are there things that will make our kids look back on us and say, 'Seriously?'

Rory Stewart:

We invested $100 billion a year, deployed 130,000 international troops, and funded hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arab militiamen. And the problem has returned, six years later, larger and nastier.

Mark Danner:

Though we have become accustomed to President Obama telling us, as he most recently did in the State of the Union address, that "America must move off a permanent war footing," these words have come to sound, in their repetition, less like the orders of a commander in chief than the pleas of one lonely man hoping to persuade. What are these words, after all, next to the iron realities of the post–September 11 world?

Chris, about Mike:

He doesn't wear a suit. He's out there with our partners across the desert, fighting a war that no one will ever know about if we win. How do you sell that to the American people?

Azan Ahmed:

The Taliban are back, but the cavalry will not be coming.

Errol Morris:

Does the world really have to be this way? Why can't it be just a little bit better?

Tim Cook:

We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick. This is my brick.

Clare Malone:

It's funny to see how normal they all look, ... these people who brought us now ubiquitous street maps and excellent e-mail design, and ... we have trusted them almost wholeheartedly up until recently, because they seem to have the best of intentions. But who's to say they always will?

A buddy of a Texan tinkerer named Gene Robinson:

I can't tell you exactly what I've been working on. But it worked.

Lawrence D. Freedman:

There are no sure lessons. Yet there are always choices.

George Friedman:

The tough part of national self-determination is the need to make decisions and live with them.

Barack Obama:

No nation is perfect. But one of the strengths that makes America exceptional is our willingness to openly confront our past, face our imperfections, make changes and do better.

Screwtape:

No man who says I'm as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did.

Rustin Cohle:

The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door.

Tony Judt:

Impossible to remember as it truly was, evil is inherently vulnerable to being remembered as it wasn't. Against this challenge memory itself is helpless.

Jony Ive:

What focus means is saying no with every bone in your body to something you know is a good idea but you say no because you're focused on something else.

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.

Ira Glass:

Don't wait till you're older, or in some better job than you have now. Don't wait for anything.

Stewart Butterfield:

Look at it hard, and find the things that do not work. Be harsh, in the interest of being excellent.

Maryam Mirzakhani:

You have to ignore low-hanging fruit ... Life isn't supposed to be easy.

David Brooks:

If you want to win the war for attention, don't try to say "no" to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say "yes" to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.

Sister Corita Kent:

It's the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

David Hilbert:

A perfect formulation of a problem is already half its solution.

Ian Leslie:

In a world awash in ready-made answers, the ability to pose difficult, even unanswerable questions is more important than ever.

Savas Dimopoulos:

Jumping from failure to failure with undiminished enthusiasm is the big secret to success.

Michael Hamelin:

The vulnerability, nicknamed "Shellshock," ... affects the Bash shell versions 1.14 through 4.3, which means that it has been around for more than 20 years.

Robert Freeman:

Significant vulnerabilities can go undetected for some time. In this case, the buggy code is at least 19 years old and has been remotely exploitable for the past 18 years.

James Comey:

The Internet is the most dangerous parking lot imaginable.

Jessy Irwin:

By preying on the absolute worst fears of administrators and parents across the country, technology companies are earning millions of dollars selling security "solutions" that do not accurately address the threat model these tools claim to dispel.

Marc Rogers:

Let's face it -- most of today's so-called "cutting edge" security defenses are either so specific, or so brittle, that they really don't offer much meaningful protection against a sophisticated attacker or group of attackers.

Eriq Gardner:

The massive hack by the so-called Guardians of Peace and ongoing leaks could raise unprecedented legal issues for Sony for years to come.

Brooks Barnes:

The incident is likely to be remembered as a failure of Hollywood leadership.

James Comey:

There are two kinds of big companies in the United States. There are those who've been hacked by the Chinese and those who don't know they've been hacked by the Chinese.

Josh Bryant:

Some of the biggest companies in the world have security that is only as good as a minimum-wage phone support worker who has the power to reset your account. And they have valid business reasons for giving them this power.

Andrea Peterson and Craig Timberg:

In an era of soaring national investment in cyber-security, the weakest link often involves the inherent fallibility of humans.

Ed Felten:

It's prudent to assume that anything on your phone is potentially at risk.

Barack Obama:

There is a reason why BlackBerrys and iPhones are not allowed in the White House Situation Room.

Dan Kaminsky:

We've migrated so much of our economy to computer networks because they are faster and more efficient, but there are side effects.

Kevin Mandia:

Ninety five percent of networks are compromised in some way.

Jerry Michalski:

Most of the devices exposed on the internet will be vulnerable. They will also be prone to unintended consequences: they will do things nobody designed for beforehand, most of which will be undesirable.

David Sanger:

The recent attacks on the financial firms raise the possibility that the banks may not be up to the job of defending themselves.

FBI:

Cyber threats pose one of the gravest national security dangers to the United States. The FBI stands ready to assist any US company that is the victim of a destructive cyber attack or breach of confidential business information.

Omner Barajas:

There is undeniable evidence that our dependence on interconnected technology is defeating our ability to secure it.

Lillian Ablon, a security researcher at the RAND Corporation:

The ability to attack is certainly ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Washington Post Editorial Board:

This is an important moment in which technology, privacy and the rule of law are colliding.

Maciej Ceglowski:

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

Sam Lessin, the head of Facebook's Identity Product Group:

The more you tell the world about yourself, the more the world can give you what you want.

Nathan Jurgenson:

Big Data always stands in the shadow of the bigger data to come.

Bruce Sterling:

The wolf's not at the door, the wolf's in the living room.

Tom Whipple:

In a world controlled by algorithms, sometimes the most apparently innocuous of processes can have unintended consequences.

Chris Coyne:

Time was, all these things we said in passing were ephemeral. We could conveniently pretend to forget. Or actually forget. Thanks to the way our lives have changed, we no longer have that option.

Maciej Ceglowski:

I've come to believe that a lot of what's wrong with the Internet has to do with memory.

David Bromwich:

We have acquired an irrepressible eagerness to watch the lives of others. We pay to be the spectators of our own loss of privacy.

Hanna Rosin:

In all my years as a parent, I've mostly met children who take it for granted that they are always being watched.

John Markoff:

During the past 15 years, video cameras have been placed in a vast number of public and private spaces. In the future, the software operating the cameras will not only be able to identify particular humans via facial recognition, experts say, but also identify certain types of behavior, perhaps even automatically alerting authorities.

Jacob Kastrenakes:

Your bag of potato chips can hear what you're saying.

Douglas Bonderud:

When it's all said and done, there's no such thing as a "free" app -- and the real cost is measured in ... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

Tim Wu:

Here's the thing: in order for airline fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as "calculated misery." Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it. And that's where the suffering begins.

Besha Rodell, on Outback:

And the steaks? The steaks aren't very good. But they're big as hell and cooked right and incredibly cheap for something as inherently decadent as steak. They aren't thin and gray; they're big and meaty. They just have no tang or depth. And maybe it's just me, but sometimes I feel as though I can taste the barely perceptible flavor of misery in a piece of meat. The cow's misery? The cook's misery? I've declared more than once that you can taste love in food, so why not misery?

Patricia Robinson:

For some reason, knowing tomorrow won't be so bad doesn't make today pass any faster. In my experience. But that awful day was Monday, and now it's Friday and I don't remember how bad I felt. Now that is a genuine blessing, because I do remember how bad I hated all the misery I can't remember.

Jules Dupuit, in 1849:

It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriage or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches ... 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.

Rob Goodman:

As Martha Nussbaum puts it, The Bacchae teaches us that "any reasonably rich and complete life, sexual or social, is lived in a complex tension between control and yielding, risking always the loss of order." How to live inside this tension, how to manage intoxication, is one of the hardest lessons that mark adulthood. It's also one of the richest.

Penelope Trunk:

I want to be writing the ideas people read late at night, with a glass of wine, to dull the searing impact of the life they've already chosen.

Samuel Johnson, 1751:

Many need no other provocation to enmity than that they find themselves excelled.

Chip Brown:

In the past some anthropologists have fetishized cultural purity, fretting over the introduction of modern technology. But cultures evolve opportunistically like species -- the Plains Indians of North America picked up their iconic horses from the Spanish -- and strong traditional cultures will privilege themselves, making the accommodations they think will ensure their futures. We can question whether a man dressed in a parrot feather headdress and penis sheath is more valuable than one in a Batman T-shirt and gym shorts. But who can be blind to their knowledge of forest plants and animals or to the preeminent values of clean water, untainted air, and the genetic and cultural treasure of diversity itself?

Samira Kawash:

In the 1960s and before, it was totally fine to give out something you'd made yourself. But once people got it in their heads that maniacs were out there trying to kill their children with Halloween treats, everything homemade was suspect. After all, you didn't know whose hands had touched that cookie and what scary ingredients might be hidden under the chocolate chips. Same for unwrapped candies and off-brand candies: If it wasn't sealed in a recognizable, major brand factory label, then it was guilty until proven innocent. National advertised candy brands were familiar and trusted, unlike that spooky neighbor who just might be an axe murderer. It's one of the huge successes of processed food marketing, to make us trust and feel good about the factory food, and to distrust and denigrate the homemade and the neighborly.

Sasha Chapman:

Now, you might say that anyone who eats chicken sashimi is engaging in high-risk behaviour; but eating is always an intimate act, and, like most acts of intimacy, it requires you to trust your partner. Somebody -- more often than not a stranger -- has created something that will end up inside you, part of you.

It's easier not to think about where our food comes from, or the risks it carries.

Tim McDonnell:

In the last 40 years, the Arctic has warmed by about 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit, more than twice the overall global rise in that same period. Already grizzly bears are tromping into polar bear territory while fish like cod and salmon are leaving their historic haunts to follow warming waters north. One tangible result of the migration, scientists report, is that animals will learn to live with new neighbors. But polar biologists worry that animals could get a little too friendly with each other.

Julie Cart:

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is weighing an environmental group's request to set aside 110,000 square miles for grizzly bears in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado.

Ian Chant:

At its heart, breeding animals represents the industrialization of mutations.

Sujata Gupta:

Whereas in 1957 a typical dairy cow produced between 500 and 600 pounds of milk over a post-natal lactation period, she now produces close to 20,000 pounds. Consequently, today's burnt-out dairy cow survives just over two lactations, compared to between 10 and 20 lactations in earlier years.