Zadie Smith:

Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?

Maria Konnikova:

False beliefs, it turns out, have little to do with one's stated political affiliations and far more to do with self-identity: What kind of person am I, and what kind of person do I want to be? All ideologies are similarly affected.

BBC:

A new study has found that a quarter of a century on, red deer on the border between the Czech Republic and old West Germany still do not cross the divide.

After tracking 300 deer, researchers said the animals are intent on maintaining the old boundaries.

One of the scientists involved told the BBC the deer are not ideological, "they are just very conservative in their habits."

Ian Leslie:

Sometimes it's only when a difficulty is removed that we realise what it was doing for us.

Sarah Kendzior:

People go to college because not going to college carries a penalty. College is a purchased loyalty oath to an imagined employer. College shows you are serious enough about your life to risk ruining it early on.

Mike Lofgren:

Beginning in 1988, every US president has been a graduate of Harvard or Yale. Beginning in 2000, every losing presidential candidate has been a Harvard or Yale graduate, with the exception of John McCain in 2008.

Frank Bruni:

Show me someone whose identity is rooted in where he or she went to college. I'll show you someone you really, really don't want at your Super Bowl party.

Jessica Pressler:

Looking around at the newly minted billionaires behind the enjoyable but wholly unnecessary Facebook and WhatsApp, Uber and Nest, the brightest minds of a generation, the high test-scorers and mathematically inclined, have taken the knowledge acquired at our most august institutions and applied themselves to solving increasingly minor First World problems. The marketplace of ideas has become one long late-night infomercial.

Ankit Agrawal, via Tyler Cowen:

China has completed, on average, at least one large dam per day since 1949.

Jamil Anderlini, via Alex Tabarrok:

In just two years, from 2011 to 2012, China produced more cement than the US did in the entire 20th century, according to historical data from the US Geological Survey and China's National Bureau of Statistics.

Peter Hunt Welch:

Not a single living person knows how everything in your five-year-old MacBook actually works.

Quinn Norton:

Your average piece-of-shit Windows desktop is so complex that no one person on Earth really knows what all of it is doing, or how.

Courtney Nash:

We have reached a point in software development where we can no longer understand, see, or control all the component parts, both technical and social/organizational -- they are increasingly complex and distributed. The business of software itself has become a distributed, complex system. How do we develop and manage systems that are too large to understand, too complex to control, and that fail in unpredictable ways?

Tom Whipple:

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

Mike Loukides:

The bottom line is that, in the security game, there's no one to trust. All trust is misplaced, and blind faith in any software provider will end up in misery.

Quinn Norton:

It's hard to explain to regular people how much technology barely works, how much the infrastructure of our lives is held together by the IT equivalent of baling wire.

Computers, and computing, are broken.

Written by people with either no time or no money, most software gets shipped the moment it works well enough to let someone go home and see their family. What we get is mostly terrible.

Scott Rich:

Why is it that modular reuse seems to work so well all of a sudden? ... The average programmer in communities like Node.js or Ruby is comfortable turning to the Lazyweb for building blocks for software. ... a few minutes of searching almost always produces candidate modules to solve a problem ...

Nikil Saval:

The proliferation of apps and gurus promising to help manage even the most basic tasks of simple existence -- the "quantified self" movement does life hacking one better, turning the simple act of breathing or sleeping into something to be measured and refined -- suggests that merely getting through the day has become, for many white-collar professionals, a set of problems to solve and systems to optimize. Being alive is easier, it turns out, if you treat it like a job.

Tom Whipple:

Gatekeeping does not pay for itself.

Dan Hon:

The model becomes the thing being modeled. This is a thing, now. Seeing the world as addressable stacks.

Oliver Burkeman, summarizing the work of Eckhart Tolle:

Interestingness gives the mind something to chew on -- but the best experiences come when you stop chewing.

Lizzie Widdicombe:

Meals provide punctuation to our lives: we're constantly recovering from them, anticipating them, riding the emotional ups and downs of a good or a bad sandwich. With a bottle of Soylent on your desk, time stretches before you, featureless and a little sad.

Ian Bogost:

Another day's work lost to the vapors of reloads, updates, clicks, and comments. Realizing that you are hyperemployed by the cloud, that you are its unpaid intern. Wondering what you'd have accomplished if you had done anything else whatsoever. Knowing that tomorrow will be no different.

Ruth Margalit:

There's a word in Hebrew -- malkosh -- that means "last rain." It's a word that only means something in places like Israel, where there's a clear distinction between winter and the long, dry stretch of summer. It's a word, too, that can only be applied in retrospect. When it's raining, you have no way of knowing that the falling drops would be the last ones of the year. But then time goes by, the clouds clear, and you realize that that rain shower was the one.

Bruce Sterling:

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

Joseph Stiglitz, via Felix Salmon:

Just because somebody is winning and somebody else is losing doesn't mean that society as a whole is benefiting in any way.

Paul Ganley and Ben Allgrove, via Alexis Madrigal:

It is important to appreciate that the notion that we currently have a "neutral" Internet is simply false.

Ian Bogost:

To fear a "pay to play" Internet because it will be less hospitable to competition and innovation is not just to board a ship that's already sailed, but to prepay your cruise vacation down the river Styx.

So as you proceed with your protests, I wonder if you might also ask, quietly, to yourself even, what new growth might erupt if we let the Internet as we know it burn. Shouldn't we at least ponder the question? Perhaps we'd be better off tolerating the venial regret of having lost something than suffering the mortal regret of enduring it.

Rosa Brooks:

Sheryl, have you ever stopped to consider that all this "leaning in" is ruining life for the rest of us?

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

Quinn Norton:

A life is measured in time. The sooner you walk away from a useless fight, the more of it you get to have. In time the net will teach you that you simply can't care about everything that deserves to be cared about.

Rebecca Solnit:

Ivory collectors in China aren't shooting elephants in Africa, but the elephants are being shot for them.

James Wood:

To have a home is to become vulnerable. Not just to the attacks of others, but to our own adventures in alienation.

William Drenttel:

In order to love your work, take vacations.

Quinn Norton:

It's ok to take breaks. In fact, it may be essential to take breaks.

Craig Mod:

As anyone working in a creative field knows, the perspective gained by spending time away from work is invaluable.

Lorne Michaels:

What I discovered after the first five years was that talented people tend to move on and less talented people tend to be the most loyal. It's rare that you find both.

David Brooks:

The tragedy of middle-aged fame is that the fullest glare of attention comes just when a person is most acutely aware of his own mediocrity.

Saundra Pelletier:

If you've got to make a tough decision about somebody, make it fast. Do it quick. If you need to replace people, let them go, because the good people you have are never going to respect you if you keep passengers. You've got to have drivers. Don't let passengers stay.

John Nack:

Merlin Mann once asked me, "What do you want ten times more of?" I knew the answer: Impact.

Tyler Cowen:

The value of living in either New York City or Washington, D.C. -- for those who seek influence -- is going up.

Nick Denton:

Don't you ever get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of bullshit? I came to this country because I thought it was something, you know? And yet I'm more in love with the idea of the United States than I am with the reality.

MLK:

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

Michael Ignatieff:

The romance of politics is what ceaselessly draws people in. Sometimes to their destruction. But without that sense of the romance of politics, no one would step up at all.

Richard Betts:

In times of change, people wonder more consciously about how the world works.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells:

If Ricky Donnell Ross sensed that he had been a pawn for forces he could barely understand, he probably wasn't wrong. The question was: What forces?

Adam Sternbergh, on "House of Cards":

It's a vision of American government not as we wish it were, but as we secretly fear it is.

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?

Rebecca Solnit:

It's as though death came riding in on a pale horse and someone said: "What? You don't like horses?"