Noam Cohen's friend:

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

Rebecca Brock:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

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.

Decius:

We're still our own greatest threat.

Paul Rosenzweig, former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy in DHS, and founder of homeland-security consultant Red Branch Consulting PLLC:

Large databases are effective [for this type of analysis] only to the extent they are actually comprehensive.

Straw Man:

Money for me, databases for you.

Dharmesh Shah:

If your data doesn't look weird, you're not looking hard enough.

David Brooks:

Falsity grows exponentially the more data we collect.

Emin Gün Sirer:

We cannot afford a graph database gap.

Jim Cortada:

We are almost at a point now where trying to do an inventory on all this data is almost a superfluous exercise. It's like trying to count all the stars in the sky.

Mary Meeker and Liang Wu:

The US government is currently experiencing the largest gap between revenue and expenses outside of WW I and WW II.

Joshua Foust:

Our lack of political tolerance of risk is arguably the worst instinct in American politics ... We, as a country, punish those politicians who urge restraint, and we reward those who expand the powers of the state. We should not be surprised at what we get. Despite the supposedly American dislike of authority, the last decade we have demonstrated that we're rather fine with expansive authority, and we'll defend it at the ballot box.

William H. Simon:

Many people have lost faith in the capacity of government to solve the problems they care about.

The Electoral Victor:

I blame you. You started it with your whingeing. I evolved to meet the demand. If I can say nothing else of a truthful kind, I can say this – what I have done, you did to me.

[So] relax and be comfortable again. I'm not going to worry you with any fancy stuff. I have my limitations, but so have you. That's why I'm here. You have elected yourselves, you see, and you can't get a more fair dinkum democratic outcome than that.

Abigail Zuger:

As an expert in the new science of outlook, Dr. Hilary Tindle offers precise technical definitions of optimism and pessimism, supplies a short validated questionnaire for readers to rate their own tendencies, and then provides "seven steps of attitudinal change" for those who come up short. These steps will probably be especially useful for individuals brimming over with a particularly bad quality known as "cynical hostility," which she has found to be associated with a 16 percent elevation in mortality over eight years.

Some of us are, sadly, too far gone to view this statistic with anything but cynicism and hostility, but those who can still save themselves may be well advised to do so.

Megan McArdle, on the 'darkness' of current critically-acclaimed TV dramas:

The truth is this: We watch so many crime dramas because there are no big stakes in middle-class American life. The criminal underworld is one place where decisions actually matter -- and can be shown to matter, dramatically.

Meg Wolitzer:

We live in a world of shouting, a world thick with millions of hands waving. Democratisation is in many ways something to celebrate, but what it's also proved is that, truly, nothing much has changed. Yes, success can be bigger and broader and more global than ever, but talent, oh talent -- we still know it when we see it, and if we're really lucky, maybe for a little while it won't get drowned out in all that noise.

Decius, in 2004:

I've come to the conclusion that you actually want shifty, dishonest politicians elected by an apathetic populace. This means that things are working.

I'm confident that technology has improved the resources available to people if/when they choose to act. So far they don't need to, largely. Don't wish for times when they do.

Bruce Schneier, last month:

Technology changes slowly, but political intentions can change very quickly.

Tyler Cowen, in June:

If the status quo of a few weeks ago is no longer an equilibrium, what happens next?

Shirley Wang, on the limits of drugs prescribed for ADHD:

The medicine may help with focus, but it doesn't help with deciding what to focus on, experts say.

Steve Coll:

America's post-September 11th national-security state has become so well financed, so divided into secret compartments, so technically capable, so self-perpetuating, and so captured by profit-seeking contractors bidding on the next big idea about big-data mining that intelligence leaders seem to have lost their facility to think independently. Who is deciding what spying projects matter most and why?

Jeremy Bentham, in 1843:

This, then, is the reasoning of the partisans of mystery: 'You are incapable of judging, because you are ignorant; and you shall remain ignorant, that you may be incapable of judging.'

Moxie:

The world we live in influences not just what we think, but how we think, in a way that a discourse about other ideas isn't able to. Any teenager can tell you that life's most meaningful experiences aren't the ones you necessarily desired, but the ones that actually transformed your very sense of what you desire.

Michael Lopp:

When it comes to state, finite is the absolute best kind of state out there.

When I'm either in the discomfort of a new job or mired in the boredom that permeates an old one, I remind myself of returning from vacation. I remember how much my brain likes it when I've shut down the state machine and see a familiar world as new. I remember there is always more to learn because the state is infinite.

Mark Leibovich:

Kurt Bardella's BlackBerry trance was broken by Karin Tanabe, a reporter then working for Politico who came over to introduce herself. Bardella's swoon was rather egregious. I listened as he told Tanabe that he "worked in oversight," which sounded like a surefire Washington pickup line to me ("Is that a subpoena in your pocket?") until Tanabe killed the mood by saying, "Oh, my boyfriend works in oversight," and the discussion ended soon after.

Jennifer Boatright on civil forfeiture in Texas:

Where are we? Is this some kind of foreign country, where they're selling people's kids off?

Have you looked it up? It'll blow your mind.

From the archive:

If you think "Russia" when you hear "oligarchy", think again.

Cory Booker's father:

Don't walk around here thinking you hit a triple when you were born on third base. You drink from a well you did not dig. There is still work to be done. Don't sit back and think democracy is a spectator sport.

Decius:

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

Decius:

Is our curse the endless pursuit of a happiness which can never be attained?

Jenny Diski:

Driving ambition might just be a way of staving off the vacuum, rather than a sign of bottomless greed for more when you have enough. An unquenchable passion for work might be a panic-stricken way of concealing the fear of a lack of passion for life itself. If you are what you do, what are you when you stop doing it and you still are?

Leisure, not doing, is so terrifying in our culture that we cut it up into small, manageable chunks throughout our working year in case an excess of it will drive us mad, and leave the greatest amount of it to the very end, in the half-conscious hope that we might be saved from its horrors by an early death.

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Tim Kreider:

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I can't help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn't a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn't matter.

John Givings:

Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

Undersecretary of Commerce Mark Foulon:

It has become clear that Internet access in itself is a vulnerability that we cannot mitigate. We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient.

BBC:

Germany's standard dictionary has included a vulgar English term, used by Chancellor Angela Merkel among others, as an acceptable German word.

Duden, the equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary in the UK, said it was reflecting the common use of the word "shitstorm" among Germans.

The word, which is used in German to denote a public outcry, seems to have caught on during the eurozone crisis.

German language experts voted it "Anglicism of the year" in 2012.

An exchange:

Horst: [threatingly] We Germans aren't all smiles und sunshine.

Burns: [recoils in mock horror] Oooh, the Germans are mad at me. I'm so scared! Oooh, the Germans! [hiding behind Smithers] Uh oh, the Germans are going to get me!

Horst: Stop it!

Man 2: Stop, sir.

Burns: Don't let the Germans come after me. Oh no, the Germans are coming after me.

Man 2: Please stop the 'pretending you are scared' game, please.

Horst: Stop it! Stop it!

Freddie deBoer:

Sometimes you have to eat shit in your life, so you eat it. It's just a question of what you can accept and what you can't.

Don't mistake ignoble hating for inaccuracy of feedback. Blind, ugly haters who are motivated by a mere desire to denigrate often give the most accurate criticism.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Toughness is really important if you are going to be a successful writer. What you need to write is the ability to not get knocked out. You need to be able to take brutal critique and tolerate awful people. But more than that, you need the physical courage to look at a blank screen, and write.

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.

Teddy Wayne:

Remember that the audience really wants you to succeed. Except for that one guy, in back, Brad. He doesn't. But don't think about him during your speech. Though it's hard not to, right? He's always so negative, with that smirk on his face. Still, block him out. Yet that smirk. It's so smugly self-satisfied. Just don't let him get to -- argh, I can't stand him. I'm sorry, I should be helping you, but I can't get Brad out of my head.

Shalini Ramachandran:

Comcast's Internet traffic is growing at a compounded annual rate of 55%, according to its chief network officer, John Schanz. That means the company is having to double its network's capacity every 18 to 24 months.

Jon Brodkin:

By 2015, on-demand video traffic will be the equivalent of three billion DVDs per month, and one million minutes worth of video will cross global IP networks every second.

Steve Lohr:

Demand is brisk for people with data skills. The McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, projects that the United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with "deep analytical" expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired, by 2020.

Laszlo Bock:

... When I was in college and grad school ... you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it's much more interesting to solve problems where there isn't an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

Neil Gaiman:

If you don't know it's impossible it's easier to do.

William Binney:

If you have a terrorist talking to somebody ... that's the first degree ... And then the second degree would be who that person ... talked to. So that becomes your zone of suspicion. ... Everybody else is innocent -- I mean, you know, of terrorism, anyway.

Jennifer Granick:

Any data might be "relevant" to an investigation eventually, if by "eventually" you mean "sometime before the end of time." If all data is "relevant," it makes a mockery of the already shaky concept of relevance.

Thomas Beller:

This is one of the central paradoxes of our culture: everything is swallowed into oblivion but nothing goes away. On the screen, it's no longer clear who is in charge of the words, or at what point they cross the line between being a fluid, rearrangeable thing in your mind and being a verifiable statement made in public, on the record, for which you may one day have to answer. Many people are worried, understandably, that everything we do -- online and off -- is retrievable by the government. But what about everything we think? How much space do we afford ourselves for private thought?

Dennis Overbye:

Is there solace to be found in the vision of places and people we can never know or reach?

Jill Lepore:

Two months after the Mazzini affair began, the Secret Department of the Post Office was abolished. What replaced it, in the long run, was even sneakier: better-kept secrets.

Neil Gaiman:

The problems of failure are hard.

The problems of success can be harder, because nobody warns you about them.

Robert J. Samuelson:

The Internet's virtues are overstated, its vices understated. It's a mixed blessing -- and the mix may be moving against us.

Jill Lepore:

In our own time, ... the only thing more cherished than privacy is publicity. In this world, we chronicle our lives on Facebook while demanding the latest and best form of privacy protection -- ciphers of numbers and letters -- so that no one can violate the selves we have so entirely contrived to expose.

Internet users:

In addition to demanding less interactivity, Internet users requested fewer links and clickable icons connected to social media outlets through which they could email, share, tweet, pin, blog, or re-blog content. Many said that when they did come across something they found interesting or amusing, nine times out of 10 they just wanted to keep it to themselves.

Thomas Frank:

Images of computers from the Fifties and Sixties ... were instruments of cold economic calculation; the devices that would reduce citizens to numbers and workers to cogs in the organization.

Big Brother is back these days, but in the meantime, the country has invested itself so deeply in its fantasy of cyber-liberation that no outrage will be sufficient to move it.

Anyway, it's all forgotten already. We're on to a different fantasy.

Chris Mooney:

If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.