George Scialabba:

Fifty-plus years into the Antidepressant Age, it's still not clear that drugs are better than placebos. Universal financial security is probably the single best countermeasure to the depression epidemic.

Anna Clark:

Over the past thirty years, reports CAP, "average tuition for a four-year college has increased more than 250 percent" -- accounting for both public and private schools -- while average family income increased only 16 percent.

The Economist Espresso:

Wealth is so unevenly distributed that you need just $3,650 (less debts) to count yourself among the richest half of the world. A mere $77,000 puts you among the wealthiest 10%. And $798,000 places you in the wealthiest 1%.

Michael Hobbes:

Maybe the problem isn't that international development doesn't work. It's that it can't.

Ryan Avent:

Is work -- and the link between work and the earning of an income sufficient to live on -- so important to society that we should want millions of people to function as meatware: doing jobs sensors and computers could and would do if only there were not an excess supply of humans needing to work in order to afford food and shelter?

Geoffrey Wheatcroft:

Repulsive as the practice of hacking cell phones is, it relies to some extent on our well-nigh universal failure to grasp that there is simply no such thing as secure telecommunication.

Kim Zetter:

It's quite possible the media are guilty of inspiring the hacker's narrative, since it was only after news reports tying the attack to the Sony film that GOP began condemning the movie in public statements. This week the hackers have pounced on that narrative, using it to escalate the stakes.

Bruce Schneier:

It's easy to fake, and it's even easier to interpret it wrong. In general, it's a situation that rapidly devolves into storytelling, where analysts pick bits and pieces of the "evidence" to suit the narrative they already have worked out in their heads.

Craig Silverman:

DiFonzo says crazy North Korea rumors are often an expression of us telling ourselves, "We are different from them; our way of life is better than their way of life or his way of life."

David Carr:

The threats and subsequent cancellation will become a nightmare with a very long tail. Let's just say the last few weeks in the American political and cultural narrative have been miserable.

Jeb Bush, a few weeks ago:

In the coming months, I hope to visit with many of you and have a conversation about restoring the promise of America.

Roger Scruton:

Children who believe in Santa Claus invest real emotions in a fiction. We who have ceased to believe have only fake emotions to offer. But the faking is pleasant. It feels good to pretend, and when we all join in, it is almost as though we were not pretending at all.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Paul Graham:

It's exciting to chase things and exciting to try to guess answers. But you have to be disciplined about not letting your hypotheses harden into anything more.

George Lucas:

Look around you. Ideas are everywhere.

Stanley Kubrick:

Either you care, or you don't. There's no in-between. And if you care, then go all of the way.

Lauren Clark:

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

Decius:

I've gotten old enough that I now understand why adults seek to escape reality.

Chris Taylor:

I think that there's an extraordinary value to escapism. It's not always about escaping from something. You can be going for something -- reaching for this other world.

Iwan Rhys Morus:

It was only around the beginning of the 1800s, as new attitudes towards progress, shaped by the relationship between technology and society, started coming together, that people started thinking about the future as a different place, or an undiscovered country -- an idea that seems so familiar to us now that we often forget how peculiar it actually is.

Pico Iyer:

Part of the power of travel is that you stand a good chance of being hollowed out by it. The lucky come back home complaining about crooked rug merchants and dishonest taxi drivers; the unlucky never come home at all.

Sanford Schwartz:

If Julian Schnabel is a surfer in the sense of knowing how to skim existence for its wonders, he is also a surfer in the more challenging sense of wanting to see where something bigger than himself, or the unknown, will take him, even with the knowledge that he might not come back from the trip.

Economist:

China overtook America in 2009 to become the world's biggest consumer of cars.

Lee Kuan Yew:

The size of China's displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance. It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.

Robert Samuelson:

If global warming is as dangerous as alarmists claim, we can't do much about it. A 2012 study by the World Resources Institute, an environmental group, found that nearly 1,200 new coal-fired plants had been proposed worldwide, three-quarters of them in China and India.

Hans Rosling via FT:

By 2100, ... the global population will peak at 11bn, with 4bn in Africa and 5bn in Asia. By that time, the main maritime thoroughfare in the world will be the Indian Ocean not the Pacific. That is the waterway that will link 9bn of the world's 11bn inhabitants. If you are looking far enough ahead, you should be buying prime beach property on the east coast of Africa.

Brad Plumer:

Currently, Africa has 1.1 billion people. By the end of the century, the researchers think there's an 80 percent chance that the continent will have between 3.5 and 5.1 billion people.

Theatre Stories:

Mickey Rooney: I was the number one star ... IN THE WORLD! YOU HEAR ME!?

[ Mickey puckers his lips and sucks. He bangs his fists together and pretends to pull a string. ]

Mickey Rooney: Bang! THE WORLD!!

Kenneth Reese-Evans: Y-e-e-s, of course. Yes, yes.

Frank Bruni:

There are few better showcases of Americans' worst impulses, circa 2014, than a 757 bound from New York to Los Angeles or from Sacramento to St. Louis. It's a mile-high mirror of our talent for pettiness, our tendency toward selfishness, our disconnection from one another and our increasing demarcation of castes.

Leontia Flynn:

the furthest distances I've travelled
have been those between people

Joseph Levine:

Speaking of the revelations about systematic government lying in the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg said that it was a tribute to the American people that our leaders felt that they had to lie to us and hide their horrendous actions; but it was no tribute to us that it was so easy.

Shikha Dalmia:

Regimes change course only when the cost of maintaining the status quo exceeds the cost of enacting change.

Imogen Sara Smith:

The power of great photographs comes from the tension between what they reveal and what they withhold. Cut off from time before and after, they have the excitement of mysteries forever on the verge of being solved.

Vivian Maier refused to show her work, but she refused just as stubbornly to be invisible. She was both hiding and seeking. Whether she wanted to be found will always remain her secret.

Stephen Dunn:

I'd come so far, it seemed,
happily looking for so little.

But then I saw a cow in a room
looking at the painting of a cow
in a field -- all of which
was a painting itself --
and I felt I'd been invited
into the actual, someplace
between the real and the real.

Stefany Anne Golberg:

I'm frightened of infinity, Cornell once told his sister, I'm frightened of many things. Cornell found comfort in the writings of Mary Baker Eddy (the founder of Christian Science), which told him that time was unreal. Through Eddy, Cornell came to see history as a jumbled invention of man. Real time was eternal. The stuff inside Pandora's box was eternity broken in pieces. Collage = reality. Joseph Cornell tried to take those broken bits and fit them together again. Each time he tried, the result was another beautiful failure.

Scott Adams:

Goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.

Savas Dimopoulos:

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

Ted Cruz:

If you can frame the narrative, you win.

Decius:

We know that this kind of stuff goes on, but in this case these people more or less spell out what they are doing in black and white. Everyone should read this memo.

Eric Fair:

Most Americans haven't read the report. Most never will.

Alexander Tyler, in 1787:

The average age of the world's greatest civilization has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence. From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance, from abundance to complacency; from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back into bondage.

Tony Judt:

The question is not going to be, Will there be an activist state? The question is going to be, What kind of an activist state?

Gabe Madway:

We want it to be perceived that the people following you are real.

Ted Cruz:

If you can frame the narrative, you win.

Craig Timberg:

Experts say it's increasingly clear that SS7, first designed in the 1980s, is riddled with serious vulnerabilities that undermine the privacy of the world's billions of cellular customers.

A single carrier in Congo or Kazakhstan, for example, could be used to hack into cellular networks in the United States, Europe or anywhere else.

Peter Singer:

The attackers wonderfully understand the American psyche. This was a hack, but call it 'cyber' and 'terrorism,' and we lose our shit. There's no other way to put it.

KABC7 Los Angeles:

An American Airlines flight from LAX to London was delayed Sunday after concerns over the name of a WiFi hotspot.

Nick Wingfield:

In April, a drone crashed trying to airlift a payload of cellphones, marijuana and tobacco over the walls of a maximum-security prison. Authorities are unsure whether drone operators made earlier undetected drops.

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.

FBI:

North Korea's attack on SPE reaffirms that cyber threats pose one of the gravest national security dangers to the United States.

Sony reported this incident within hours, which is what the FBI hopes all companies will do when facing a cyber attack. The FBI stands ready to assist any US company that is the victim of a destructive cyber attack or breach of confidential business information.

Shawn Henry, FBI executive assistant director [in 2012]:

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.

Ted Cruz:

If you can frame the narrative, you win.