Jeff Leach:

Maybe because we've un-wilded our children, that might play a role in some of the diseases we see in them.

Chris Rock:

Kids raised on a culture of "We're not going to keep score in the game because we don't want anybody to lose." Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can't say "the black kid over there." No, it's "the guy with the red shoes." You can't even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.

Bob Lefsetz:

That's what's wrong with America, all the damn apologizing. It would be one thing if these people really made a mistake, but the truth is they're afraid of being excoriated by the press and public, they're afraid to own their identities.

W. Kamau Bell:

When acquaintances haven't seen me for awhile, I often hear, "I forgot how tall you are!" I know you did. It's because I'm trying to make you forget.

Rebecca Brock:

You can't even remember what I'm trying to forget.

Alan Jacobs:

Often we may find that the modes of attention we prefer are in tension with the environments of attention in which we find ourselves.

Sue Halpern:

Among these enchanted objects ... [is] a jacket that gives you a hug every time someone likes your Facebook post.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I don't have many writing regrets. But this is one of them. I regret not saying what I thought of the accusations, and then pursuing those thoughts. I regret it because the lack of pursuit puts me in league with people who either looked away, or did not look hard enough. I take it as a personal admonition to always go there, to never flinch, to never look away.

Chelsea Wald:

Studies have shown that mirrors can improve the lives of a variety of laboratory, zoo, farm, and companion animals. Isolated cows and sheep have lower stress reactions when mirrors are around.

Julia Baird:

Our social media have narrowed the definition of beauty to that which can be photographed and posted, usually by ourselves. And what we have done is neglect charm in the pursuit of beauty.

An exchange:

Jules: I wouldn't go so far as to call a dog filthy, but they're definitely dirty. But, a dog's got personality. Personality goes a long way.

Vincent: Ah, so by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he would cease to be a filthy animal. Is that true?

Jules: Well, we'd have to be talkin' about one charming motherfucking pig. I mean, he'd have to be ten times more charming than that Arnold on Green Acres, you know what I'm saying?

Amy Davidson:

It is an article of faith with [Bush family supporters] that Jeb Bush is a natural leader. And yet his presence reminds one of Play-Doh left out of the container too long.

Paul Luikart:

So now I see that the deer is looking out beyond me, out into the shadows of Tom's apartment. Then I feel the deer's gaze. Feel it suddenly looking at me. I suck in a little breath, find myself actually bowing my head, and even though I'm thinking, "Wha... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

James Risen:

My own gut tells me that what Obama decided to do was in early 2009 decided to focus on economic and healthcare policies and that in order to do those things on the domestic side, he had to protect his flank on national security and not fight the Republicans on national security, so I think there was a calculated move by Obama to prolong the War on Terror in order to try to focus on domestic issues. And I think that after a while, he lost control of that narrative.

Daniel P. Bolger:

The surge in Iraq did not "win" anything. It bought time. It allowed us to kill some more bad guys and feel better about ourselves. But in the end, shackled to a corrupt, sectarian government in Baghdad and hobbled by our fellow Americans' unwillingness to commit to a fight lasting decades, the surge just forestalled today's stalemate.

Steve Kroft:

It's less a case of wanting to get something done, than coming up with the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to do it. There is no shortage of ideas from Democrats or Republicans who've suggested everything from raising the gas tax to funding infrastructure through corporate tax reform. But there is no consensus and not much political support for any of the alternatives ...

Michael Tomasky:

Obama's top priorities heading into the last two years of his administration should be these four items: protecting the health care law, trying to see that the recovery extends to middle-class wages, strengthening the anti-ISIS coalition, and working to secure the nuclear deal with Iran.

Of my four suggested priorities, you may have noticed that Obama's ability to control them is quite limited. In each case, the other branches of government will have arguably more power than even Obama to shape outcomes. This reflects the reality of American politics today. And with Republican Senate and House committee chairmen soon to have investigative and subpoena power, the Obama era will likely end as acrimoniously as it began. Or perhaps even more so.

Francis Fukuyama:

The depressing bottom line is that given how self-reinforcing the country's political malaise is, and how unlikely the prospects for constructive incremental reform are, the decay of American politics will probably continue until some external shock comes along to catalyze a true reform coalition and galvanize it into action.

Adam Gopnik:

The best argument for reading history is not that it will show us the right thing to do in one case or the other, but rather that it will show us why even doing the right thing rarely works out. What history generally "teaches" is how hard it is for anyone to control it, including the people who think they're making it.

Martin Wolf:

It is hard to shift bad political equilibria.

Mike Konczal:

What undid the punitive bounty system was precisely its illegitimacy in the eyes of the people it exerted power over, and the desire to rectify it by building a legitimate state and bureaucracy in its place. But we now live in an era when the legitimacy of the state itself is under attack.

Charles Simic:

We now live in a country whose political system is too corrupt to defend itself from crooks. Should some senator or congressman have a sudden attack of conscience and blurt something out, "dark money" brings them to their senses and reminds them that their job is to facilitate the transfer of public funds into the pockets of the few and to not ask too many questions.

Andy Herrmann:

You're sitting there at these committee meetings; they seem to agree with you. Yes, we have to make investments in infrastructure. Yes, we have to do these things. But then they come around and say, "Well, where are we going to get the money?" And you sort of sit to yourself and say to yourself, "Well, we elected you to figure that out."

George Packer:

Trained to see the invisible world in terms of particles and waves, Angela Merkel learned to approach problems methodically, drawing comparisons, running scenarios, weighing risks, anticipating reactions, and then, even after making a decision, letting it sit for a while before acting. She once told a story from her childhood of standing on a diving board for the full hour of a swimming lesson until, at the bell, she finally jumped.

Hazem Kandil:

One of the first lessons imprinted on the mind of Muhammad Habib, who joined in 1969 and rose to become the general guide's first deputy (until 2009), was that cultivating the right type of Muslim is what will eventually bring Brothers to power. It is no coincidence that the Brotherhood's first and second founders, Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, were educated at the Teachers College and graduated as primary schoolteachers. In their writings, cultivation is treated more meticulously than anything else. For while this process might strike the casual observer as simple indoctrination with a religious flavor, it is actually an elaborate activity that borrows from at least four different schools: it instills a transformative worldview in the minds of members, as communists do; it claims that converting into this worldview is contingent upon a spiritual conversion, as in mystic orders; it presents this worldview as simple, uncorrupted religion, as in puritan movements; and it insists that this worldview cannot be readily communicated to society because it is not yet ready to handle the truth of the human condition, as in masonic lodges. The ultimate aim, therefore, is not to win over more believers, but to produce a new kind of person: the Muslim Brother. This is a person striving for a new world through a spiritual struggle that reproduces the experience of early Muslims.

Economist:

In a country where detailed maps are often regarded as state secrets (until recently many villages were not even marked on them), navigating by map is not a skill that many learn. As Peter Hessler, an American journalist, wrote in a 2010 book, "Country Driving", about his car journeys in China: "Even professional drivers with years of experience could be hopelessly confused by a simple atlas."

Andrew Ng:

In China, some users are less sophisticated, and you get queries that you just wouldn't get in the United States. For example, we get queries like, "Hi Baidu, how are you? I ate noodles at a corner store last week and they were delicious. Do you think they're on sale this weekend?" That's the query.

Pope Francis:

I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess. The structural and organizational reforms are secondary -- that is, they come afterward. The first reform must be the attitude. The ministers of the Gospel must be people who can warm the hearts of the people, who walk through the dark night with them, who know how to dialogue and to descend themselves into their people's night, into the darkness, but without getting lost. The bishops ... must be able to support the movements of God among their people with patience, so that no one is left behind. But they must also be able to accompany the flock that has a flair for finding new paths.

Charles Simic:

What makes a career in white-collar crime so attractive is that there are so few risks anymore.

Mike Konczal:

For decades the state, professionalized bureaucracy, democratic control of public finance, and the public itself have been vilified, while incentive pay and volunteerism -- exemplified by homeschooling, armed self-defense, the anti-vaccination movement, and other forms of civic abandonment -- have been ascendant. But as history shows, these rearguard actions make a fragile line of defense against the state's imperfections, and the ills of corruption and illegitimacy they breed can be far worse than any problems such anti-public measures may hope to solve.

Justin Fenton:

Baltimore prosecutors withdrew key evidence in a robbery case Monday rather than reveal details of the cellphone tracking technology police used to gather it.

Edward Hasbrouck:

For more than a decade, advertising for Las Vegas' hotels and casinos has centered on the implied promise to protect the privacy of their guests' activities while on their premises, "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas." But these same casinos and hotels have actually been in the vanguard of the hospitality industry in guest surveillance, with the owners of Caesar's in particular recognized as the industry leaders.

James Risen:

It is difficult to recognize the limits a society places on accepted thought at the time it is doing it. When everyone accepts basic assumptions, there don't seem to be constraints on ideas. That truth often only reveals itself in hindsight.

Henry Corrigan-Gibbs:

Diffie and Hellman's now-legendary key-exchange algorithm has an elegant one-line representation. Debates over academic freedom and government secrecy do not lend themselves to such a concise formulation. "It's not a neat, simple calculation," Aftergood said. "There are competing interests on all sides, and somehow one just has to muddle through.

BBC:

According to Prof Steve Rayner of Oxford University, it is easier to devise the technology than to understand its effects or how its use should be governed.

Emily Eakin:

A year and a half ago, a few dozen physicians in the United States offered FMT. Today, hundreds do, and OpenBiome, a nonprofit stool bank founded last year by graduate students at M.I.T., ships more than fifty specimens each week to hospitals in thirty-six states. The Cleveland Clinic named fecal transplantation one of the top ten medical innovations for 2014, and biotech companies are competing to put stool-based therapies through clinical trials and onto the market. In medicine, at any rate, human excrement has become a precious commodity.

It's possible that no Americans have gut microbiomes that are truly healthy.

Stewart Butterfield:

I try to instill this into the rest of the team but certainly I feel that what we have right now is just a giant piece of shit. Like, it's just terrible and we should be humiliated that we offer this to the public. Not everyone finds that motivational, though.

Jon Bois:

Working at RadioShack was sort of the worst of two worlds: there was the poverty-level income of a blue-collar retail job, coupled with the expectations, political nonsense, and corporate soullessness of the white-collar environment.

Paul Ford:

The ultimate function of any standards body is epistemological; given an enormous range of opinions, it must identify some of them as beliefs. The automatic validator is an encoded belief system. Not every Web site offers valid HTML, just as not every Catholic eschews pre-marital sex. The percentage of pure and valid HTML on the web is probably the same as the percentage of Catholics who marry as virgins.

Paul Graham Raven:

We offload physical effort onto our technologies, but are hence increasingly obliged to engage in other forms of labour in order to sustain the infrastuctures on which those technologies depend; the increasing interdependencies of infrastructure act as multipliers of technological effectiveness, but as they do so they push us further out onto the brittle, skinny branches of the technological path-dependency tree.

Bob Lefsetz:

You're a student of the game. You believe since you're passionate, you deserve not only a chance, but success.

But the truth is everybody wants to play. And the sieve to success is extremely narrow. Because people don't have time for mediocre, they don't even have time for good!

Spy Magazine:

Whenever a traveler from the East Coast announces that he is making a trip to California, he is expected to express revulsion if his business trip takes him to the cultural cesspool of Los Angeles but to leap into paroxysms of ecstasy should his business to him to the shining city on the hill where little cable cars run halfway to the stars. (Should he announce that his business is taking him to San Diego, people will usually tell him to visit the zoo.)

We hold no brief for, nor have any ax to grind against, the burgeoning municipality of San Diego; it certainly has a nice zoo. Yet on the question of San Francisco vs. Los Angeles, we feel compelled to advance a minority view and admit that we generally like LA, while finding San Francisco, a quaint hamlet that has somehow confused itself with Byzantium, has long benefitted from an uninterrupted stream of booster-spawned propaganda that has hornswoggled the American public. Consequently they believe that what is basically a glorified Austin, a slightly less nippy Ann Arbor, a boho Vancouver, a New Hope writ large or a seismically suspect Charlottesville is actually a first-tier municipality, one that can take its place alongside such world-class North American cities as New York, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, Montreal, and, of course, Los Angeles. Frankly we find this idea quite ludicrous. In our view, San Francisco is Quebec with more Chinese restaurants.

Siobhan Gorman and Adam Entous:

Visiting North Korea, James Clapper said, was "kind of on my bucket list."

TK:

Sweetness is the cancer that is slowly killing Korean cuisine.

A representative at the Jianning Cold Warehouse:

All lamb skewers right now are not real. There aren't any real lamb skewers anymore.

Lan Guijun:

China has such serious food safety issues these days that you need years of experience to buy well: you have to be like an antique collector who can sniff out genuine articles among all the fakes.

Zhao Lu:

I had some stomach convulsions, but I'm OK now. I wouldn't recommend that normal people try this.

Nicola Twilley:

Nearly half of everything that is grown in China rots before it even reaches the retail market.

Americans, too, throw away 40 percent of their food, but nearly half of that waste occurs at the consumer level, meaning in retail locations and at home.

Vernon Bogdanor:

A.J.P. Taylor once said that we learn from history not to repeat the old mistakes. So we make new ones instead.

Paul Graham Raven:

Better technology doesn't necessarily mean thinking about what a technology does or how it does it, but about why you wanted the technology in the first place, and what you definitely don't want it to do.

Michael Hobbes:

This is the paradox: When you improve something, you change it in ways you couldn't have expected.

My favorite example of unintended consequences comes, weirdly enough, from the United States. In a speech to a criminology conference, Nancy G. Guerra, the director of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Delaware, described a project where she held workshops with inner-city Latina teenagers, trying to prevent them from joining gangs. The program worked in that none of the girls committed any violence within six months of the workshops. But by the end of that time, they were all, each and every one, pregnant.

James Kynge:

Chinese children are taught that "diligence is a cash cow and thrift is a gold mine", while adults are warned in one somewhat humorous proverb that "going to bed early to save candles is not economical if the result is twins".

Rachel Feintzeig:

[In] the frenzied job market of the latest tech boom, product developers frequently get multiple job offers and six-figure starting salaries right out of college.

BBC:

Ayan Qureshi is now a Microsoft Certified Professional after passing the tech giant's exam when he was just five years old.

Hal Salzman:

Average wages in the IT industry are the same as those that prevailed when Bill Clinton was president.

Evelyn M. Rusli:

The average salary for a software engineer is about $126,000, up 20% from 2012, according to tech-jobs site Dice. Top engineers' salaries can be double that or more.

Lizzie Widdecombe:

Stephen Bradley had come to think that developers were like social media itself: "Ninety-nine per cent of them suck."

"What kind of price range are we talking about?" Bradley asked.

"Ballpark, for this role you're talking a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars an hour."

In Silicon Valley, the average engineer's salary is around a hundred and thirty thousand dollars a year, according to a recent analysis by the Brookings Institution -- cheap, when compared with the potential profits. Apple makes more than two million dollars in revenue per employee each year.