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?

Robin Hanson:

The pundit[s]/wonk[s] ... seemed to hold fast to a simple moral principle: when a future change is framed as a problem which we might hope our political system to solve, then the only acceptable reason to talk about the consequences of failing to solve that problem is to scare folks into trying harder to solve it. If you instead assume that politics will fail to solve the problem, and analyze the consequences of that in more detail, not to scare people but to work out how to live in that scenario, you are seen as expressing disloyalty to the system and hostility toward those who will suffer from that failure.

Ira Glass:

If you're not failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get super-lucky.

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

Han San, 9th century:

There are roads, but they do not lead to the world;
Since I am mindless, who can rouse my thoughts?
On a bed of stones I sit, alone in the night,
While the moon climbs up Cold Mountain.

Li Po:

We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness,
but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Cathy O'Neil:

Data science expertise has been commodified, and it's a race to the bottom. Who will solve my business-critical data problem on a short-term consulting basis for less than $5000? Less than $4000?

Paul Ford:

The people who knew the least were generally the most willing to offer counsel.

Straw Man:

Money for me, databases for you.

Howard Beck:

The NBA ... on Thursday announced plans to install sophisticated tracking cameras, known as the SportVu system, in every arena for the coming season, creating an unprecedented treasure trove of data about virtually every wrinkle of the game.

SportVu, developed by Stats LLC, records data points for all 10 players, the three referees and the ball, every 30th of a second, measuring speed, distance, player separation and ball possession. Every step, every dribble, every pass, every shot, every rebound -- really, every movement -- will be recorded, coded and categorized.

Ben Bernanke:

If your uniform isn't dirty, you haven't been in the game.

Stuart Armstrong:

Mass surveillance would combat all kinds of abuses that currently go unreported because the abuser has power over the abused. You see this dynamic in a variety of scenarios, from the dramatic (child abuse) to the more mundane (line managers insisting on illegal, unpaid overtime). Even if the victim is too scared to report the crime, the simple fact that the recordings existed would go a long way towards equalising existing power differentials. There would be the constant risk of some auditor or analyst stumbling on the recording, and once the abused was out of the abuser's control (grown up, in another job) they could retaliate and complain, proof in hand. The possibility of deferred vengeance would make abuse much less likely to occur in the first place.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

Stephen Marche:

No drug dealer ever worries about demand. Ever. The hunger for illegal drugs in America is assumed to be limitless. Why? One answer is that drugs feed a human despair that is equally limitless. And there is plenty of despair, no doubt. But the question becomes more complicated when you consider how many people are drugging themselves legally.

Harry Mount:

Like Hamlet, the rich yearn for infinite space.

In the end, even infinite space isn't enough.

Nathan Heller:

The future of tech influence is not suburban, as it has been for half a century. It's the city.

Teju Cole:

The city is a sea that can swallow you at any time, a monster that can lash out without warning, a hell of variables and uncertainties. What the solution should be is not clear.

Andrew O'Hagan:

Maybe the small things have gone out of focus. The world is full of things that remain undiscovered until you find them for yourself.

Julia Margaret Cameron:

What is focus and who has the right to say what focus is the legitimate focus?

Pope Francis:

We must not focus on occupying the spaces where power is exercised, but rather on starting long-run historical processes. We must initiate processes rather than occupy spaces.

Evelyn Rusli:

Facebook and Twitter are in a heated fight to own the Web's town square, because becoming the go-to hub for real-time events like television shows could draw more user activity and more advertising dollars. A key piece in winning this battle is data -- proving to networks and advertisers that the activity on their service is meaningful.

Marco Arment:

Many people with iPhones and iPads full of apps have never bought a single paid-up-front one.

Paul Ford:

A few months ago there was a good bit of speculation as to who owns your [digital] music after you die, and the answer was: "no one you know."

Oh, for the days when record stores featured bootlegs and cats. The clerks might have been snotty, but at least you didn't have to have endless discussions about databases and doctrine.

Jim Davis, Senior VP and CMO at SAS:

If you look at your data as money, how might you treat it differently?

Rick Smolan:

A gentleman has a pacemaker; it's a wireless pacemaker, so throughout his day the data from his heart is transmitted to his doctor, and he actually spent time looking at his exercise, his nutrition, his alcohol consumption, and he wanted to find out whether there is some correlation between his other activities and when his pacemaker kicked in. So he called the manufacturer saying, "Could I get a copy of the last six months of my heart data?" and they said, "Sorry, sir, this is proprietary." He said, "Wait a second. This is my heart. You have been collecting information about my heart; I want a copy of the information." They have refused to give it to him.

Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation:

Countries are competing to be the Cayman Islands of data privacy.

Matthew Buchanan:

We need to regulate how public data is used, not whether it's available.

Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

Decius:

People are more likely to notice minor things that are annoying to them whereas they aren't keeping track of who does and does not have access to healthcare unless they are a member of the minority of people who does not have access now.

Father:

Please! Please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion! Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who.

Michael Lewis:

You can't forget to bear-proof the garbage cans, and expect the bears won't notice.

Jon Lee Anderson:

The air stinks heavily of raw sewage, but no one seems to notice.

Julian Barnes:

When you change your make of car, you suddenly notice how many other cars of the same sort there are on the road. They register in a way they never did before. When you are widowed, you suddenly notice all the widows and widowers coming towards you.

Horace Dediu:

This is the crux of the incumbent's dilemma: how do you rally a response when you don't feel any pain? It's worse actually: how do you embark on a painful course of action while feeling comfortable and safe?

Nathan Heller:

Providing an escape valve for a system's strongest users lessens the pressure for change.

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

David Foster Wallace:

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

Paul Ford:

You meet kids with developmental issues, or kids with serious illnesses. The parents have gone a little off, exhausted by the stress. They are tired and often curt. Whatever they're doing is the best they can do, and you think, I can't imagine. But of course you do imagine. When you see the kid with the extra chromosome, you see that it's the same exact love that you know. It's all the same love.

Rachel DeWoskin:

Is it possible to re-imagine what you can't remember?

My friend, the writer Emily Rapp,
who just lost her baby, Ronan, to Tay-Sachs,
likes to respond,
"Yes, you can,"
when people say, "I can't imagine."

Marcel Proust:

We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, and effort which no one can spare us.

Michael Chabon:

Art is a form of exploration, of sailing off into the unknown alone, heading for those unmarked places on the map. If children are not permitted -- not taught -- to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?

Nathan Heller:

San Francisco has traditionally been a Dungeness crab of a city, shedding its carapace from time to time and burrowing down until a new shell sets. It has not been an industry town in the sense of New York, which media and finance have shaped for well over a century. It is not like Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles, whose dreams are dominated by one Hydra-headed business. San Francisco has never been dominated by anything, but it's always ended up preeminent in something. Gold, for instance. Free love. Microchips. People do not move to San Francisco as much as swarm to it. Those irked by change rarely stay long.

Lately, the pattern has begun to break. San Francisco is an industry town.

An exchange:

Marge: I'd really like to give it a try!
Homer: I don't know, Marge, trying is the first step towards failure.

Nathan Deuel:

On the radio, a host was talking about a bullet-proof insert available for kids' backpacks. ... On the radio, someone said an A-10 fighter jet had accidentally dropped an inert practice bomb on the parking lot of a bar in Maryland. The barkeep said she knew precisely what time the bomb struck because her outdoor surveillance camera had caught the impact. No one had noticed. Customers were too busy, she said, and the music was too loud.

Monsanto:

The Climate Corporation was founded in 2006 by a highly successful team of software engineers and data scientists formerly with Google and other leading Silicon Valley technology companies. Since that time, the company has built the agriculture industry's most advanced technology platform combining hyper-local weather monitoring, agronomic data modeling, and high-resolution weather simulations to deliver a complete suite of full-season monitoring, analytics and risk-management products.

Sasha Frere-Jones:

When are you implicated in the funding around you? Always?

John Brockman:

Those of us involved in communicating ideas need to re-think the Internet. Many of the people that desperately need to know, don't even know that they don't know.

Evgeny Morozov:

All these efforts … are driven by a pervasive and dangerous ideology that I call "solutionism": an intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are "solvable" with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal. Thus, forgetting and inconsistency become "problems" simply because we have the tools to get rid of them -- and not because we've weighed all the philosophical pros and cons.

William H. Simon:

People have strong tendencies to drift with the status quo rather than opt for change, to succumb unreflectively to rhetoric and imagery, and to excessively discount the future.

Amy Zegart:

This is a policy debate …

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?

Bruce Schneier:

The solutions have to be political.

Julian Borger:

Dilma Rousseff called on the UN oversee a new global legal system to govern the internet.

Donald Rumsfeld:

Simply because a problem is shown to exist doesn't necessarily follow that there is a solution.

Bot & Dolly:

"Box" explores the synthesis of real and digital space through projection-mapping on moving surfaces. The short film documents a live performance, captured entirely in camera. Bot & Dolly produced this work to serve as both an artistic statement and technical demonstration. It is the culmination of multiple technologies, including large scale robotics, projection mapping, and software engineering. We believe this methodology has tremendous potential to radically transform theatrical presentations, and define new genres of expression.

At LACMA, through April 2014:

James Turrell: A Retrospective explores nearly fifty years in the career of James Turrell, a key artist in the Southern California Light and Space movement of the 1960s and 70s. The exhibition includes early geometric light projections, prints and drawings, installations exploring sensory deprivation and seemingly unmodulated fields of colored light, and recent two-dimensional work with holograms. One section is devoted to the Turrell masterwork in process, Roden Crater, a site-specific intervention into the landscape just outside Flagstaff, Arizona, presented through models, plans, photographs, and films.

Morgan Meis:

I'd like to suggest that the best way to approach and interpret James Turrell's installation at the Guggenheim is to say it is a Quaker meeting. Observe, if you will, what happens when people enter the ground floor of the museum. They stop and look up. They see that the spirals of the Guggenheim have been transformed into a glowing light installation. They roam around for a minute or so looking up. Then they find a space to lie down on the floor. Generally, they stop talking. They watch the glowing lights and the luminescent egg. This silent watching goes on for many minutes. More than ten minutes. More than fifteen minutes for many people, and more than that for others.

In other words, James Turrell has managed to get people in New York City to lie on the floor silently meditating for more than ten minutes. Most of these people have never meditated in their lives. Many of them would not sit still silently for ten minutes if you paid them to do so. But the power of the egg compels them.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!