Glenn Greenwald:

For anyone who supports the general Obama "war on terror" approach or specifically his claimed power to target even US citizens for execution without charges, it's impossible to object to Graham's arguments on principled or theoretical grounds. Once you endorse the "whole-globe-is-a-battlefield" theory, then there's no principled way to exclude US soil.

Bruce Schneier:

This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it's efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell.

Sure, we can take measures to prevent this. We can turn our cell phones off and spend cash. But increasingly, none of it matters.

Mark Andreesen:

A lot of people looked at Facebook and saw a Web site. None of the people close to Mark [Zuckerberg] and the company thought of Facebook as a Web site. They think of it as a data set, a feedback loop.

David Montgomery, Sari Horwitz and Marc Fisher:

How federal and local investigators sifted through that ocean of evidence ... is an object lesson in how hard it is to separate the meaningful from the noise in a world awash with information.

Rolf Dobelli:

Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. You are not that irresponsible with your money, reputation or health. Why give away your mind?

Adam C. Engst:

Our only weapon in the war against the infinite is self-control. Regardless of the specifics, if you overindulge in information, no matter how good your tools, you will eventually be crushed by the infinite.

Stefany Anne Golberg:

Never mind not seeing the forest for the trees. In this ... you cannot even see the trees for the bark.

Evgeny Morozov:

Just as Amazon's algorithms make it possible to predict what books you are likely to buy next, similar algorithms might tell the police how often -- and where -- certain crimes might happen again. Ever stolen a bicycle? Then you might also be interested in robbing a grocery store.

Facebook is at the cutting edge of algorithmic surveillance here.

Bruce Schneier:

Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time.

Your Local High Speed Internet & Cable Provider:

We believe in money. Pools of money.

Mark Andreesen:

A lot of people looked at Facebook and saw a Web site. None of the people close to Mark [Zuckerberg] and the company thought of Facebook as a Web site. They think of it as a data set, a feedback loop.

Dexter Filkins:

In recent years, eighty-four per cent of the Army's majors have been promoted to lieutenant colonel -- hardly a fine filter. Becoming a general was like gaining admission to an all-men's golf club, where back-slapping conformity is prized above all else.

Quentin Hardy:

In January this year, Florida's Juvenile Justice Department reported that 114,538 youth and employee records had disappeared when a mobile storage device with no password was stolen. The state will pay for a year of credit monitoring for everyone whose data was lost.

Department of Urology, University of California, San Francisco:

Between 2002 and 2010, an estimated 17616 patients presented to US EDs with trouser zip injuries to the genitals. The penis was almost always the only genital organ involved. Zip injuries represented nearly one-fifth of all penile injuries. Amongst adults, zips were the most frequent cause of penile injuries. Annual zip-related genital injury incidence remained stable over the study period.

Graham Hill:

The average size of a new American home in 1950 was 983 square feet; by 2011, the average new home was 2,480 square feet. In 1950, an average of 3.37 people lived in each American home; in 2011, that number had shrunk to 2.6 people.

The Orb:

What were the skies like when you were young?

They went on forever
and they,
when I,
we lived in Arizona
And the skies always had little fluffy clouds
And they moved down,
they were long and clear
And there were lots of stars at night

Julie Bosman:

What would New York or Shanghai look like with a full sky of brilliant stars? Thierry Cohen, a French photographer, thinks he can show us by blending city scenes -- shot and altered to eliminate lights and other distractions -- and the night skies from less populated locations that fall on the same latitudes. The result is what city dwellers might see in the absence of light pollution. So Paris gets the stars of northern Montana, New York those of the Nevada desert. As Cohen, whose work will be exhibited at the Danziger Gallery in New York in March, sees it, the loss of the starry skies, accelerated by worldwide population growth in cities, has created an urbanite who "forgets and no longer understands nature." He adds, "To show him stars is to help him dream again."

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Starry, Starry, Starry Night

Christoph Niemann:

Simplicity is not about making something without ornament, but rather about making something very complex, then slicing elements away, until you reveal the very essence.

James Lewis:

You've got to keep grinding.

Calvin Trillin:

Writing the story at seventy lines didn't mean the compressing was over. At the end of the week (or "at week's end," as we would have put it, in order to save three words), the makeup people would invariably inform us that the story had to be shortened to fit into the section. Since words or passages cut for space were marked with a green pencil -- changes that had to be made because of something like factual error were in red -- the process was called greening. The instructions were expressed as how many lines had to be greened -- "Green seven" or "Green twelve." I loved greening. I don't have any interest in word games -- I don't think I've ever done a crossword or played Scrabble -- but I found greening a thoroughly enjoyable puzzle. I was surprised that what I had thought of as a tightly constructed seventy-line story -- a story so tightly constructed that it had resisted the inclusion of that maddening leftover fact--was unharmed, or even improved, by greening ten per cent of it. The greening I did in Time Edit convinced me that just about any piece I write could be improved if, when it was supposedly ready to hand in, I looked in the mirror and said sternly to myself "Green fourteen" or "Green eight." And one of these days I'm going to begin doing that.

Jhumpa Lahiri:

The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail.

I hear sentences as I'm staring out the window, or chopping vegetables, or waiting on a subway platform alone. They are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, handed to me in no particular order, with no discernible logic. I only sense that they are part of the thing.

Geoffrey O'Brien:

Quotes are the actual fabric with which the mind weaves: internalizing them, but also turning them inside out, quarreling with them, adding to them, wandering through their architecture as if a single sentence were an expansible labyrinthine space.

At a certain point, in a necessary act of appropriation, you make it part of who you are, whether or not you ever quote it to anyone but yourself. Culture then is not a wall "over there" but the very tiles out of which your own thoughts are constructed.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Henry David Thoreau:

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

Teddy Wayne:

"We need to hire a 22-22-22," one new-media manager was overheard saying recently, meaning a 22-year-old willing to work 22-hour days for $22,000 a year.

Perhaps the middle figure is an exaggeration, but its bookends certainly aren't.

Kilian Jornet Burgada asks himself:

How much is it worth sacrificing to do what you love?

Cal Newport:

Do less. But do what you do with complete and hard focus. Then when you're done be done, and go enjoy the rest of the day.

David Ferguson:

My advice? Just find the thing you enjoy doing more than anything else, your one true passion, and do it for the rest of your life on nights and weekends when you're exhausted and cranky and just want to go to bed.

It could be anything -- music, writing, drawing, acting, teaching -- it really doesn't matter. All that matters is that once you know what you want to do, you dive in a full 10 percent and spend the other 90 torturing yourself because you know damn well that it's far too late to make a drastic career change, and that you're stuck on this mind-numbing path for the rest of your life.

Is there any other way to live?

Nathaniel Rich:

The deeper you dive, the more you get paid.

Cormac McCarthy:

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

James Lewis:

You've got to keep grinding.

Peter Thiel:

Probably the most extreme form of inequality is between people who are alive and people who are dead.

Michael Chertoff:

We are in a race against time.

Nicole Perlroth:

Janet Napolitano knows she has a problem that will only worsen. So she needs her own hackers. "We have to show them how cool and exciting this is," said Ed Skoudis.

One answer? Start young, and make it a game, even a competition.

Mary Meeker:

Do humans want everything to be like a game?

Abigail Pesta:

For the past year and a half, Brett Coulthard has been running a business, the Frivolous Engineering Co., that sells kits to build useless machines. For people who would rather not spend any money on a useless machine, Mr. Coulthard also provides free instructions.

Marvin Minsky dreamed up the useless machine, although the name he gave it was the "ultimate machine."

Nathan Heller:

Back in Sweden, the guys told me, they were studying computer science at university, and -- well, you know how it is: one thing leads to another, and soon you find yourself carving sheep bellies for a little extra cash.

Benjamin Carlson:

The "junket" industry of Macau brings high-rolling gamblers to the territory and collects debts on behalf of the casinos. These businesses also allow VIPs to stake more than the $50,000 legal limit on how much money Chinese are permitted to take out of the country every year. (In essence, junkets collect their clients' money on the Chinese side of the border and give them loans to gamble on the Macau side.)

Patrick McKenzie:

Add revenue. Reduce costs. Those are your only goals.

Urs Hoelzle:

We launched Google Reader in 2005 in an effort to make it easy for people to discover and keep tabs on their favorite websites. While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined. So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader. Users and developers interested in RSS alternatives can export their data, including their subscriptions, with Google Takeout over the course of the next four months.

Alan Green:

We have just announced on the Official Google Blog that we will soon retire Google Reader (the actual date is July 1, 2013). We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We're sad too.

There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we're pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience.

Occupy Google Reader, from November 2011:

If I wanted Facebook I'd use it.

Who is in charge out there?

Peak Google

Quentin Hardy:

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, unauthorized disclosures of confidential information, whether from unsecured devices, leaky apps or poor cloud security, must be announced publicly if the information could affect a company's stock price.

Dexter Filkins:

Our ignorance is not total, but our information is nowhere near adequate.

NYT:

Executives should understand that openly discussing threats helps everyone become more alert to risks, which would be in their own long-term interest.

Ashkan Soltani:

It's not a matter of whether or not you've been compromised. It's whether you have the expertise to tell.

James Harkin:

No matter, because the rewards are going to be tremendous. Big data is on the cusp of becoming a "significant corporate asset", so much so that it may even help the west to win back manufacturing advantage from the developing world. Soon, they claim airily, it "may be able to tell whether we're falling in love".

Most of all, we have to know what we want to achieve and what we want big data to do. Otherwise, like the previous iterations of internet futurism, big data will remain a showy buzzword - full of sound and fury, signifying very little.

David Brooks:

As we acquire more data, we have the ability to find many, many more statistically significant correlations. Most of these correlations are spurious and deceive us when we're trying to understand a situation. Falsity grows exponentially the more data we collect. The haystack gets bigger, but the needle we are looking for is still buried deep inside.

Straw Man:

Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.

Michael W. Clune:

Augustine writes that the experience of a person listening to a song he knows well becomes thin, ghostly. The listener feels himself "stretched" between the memory of the notes just played and the anticipation of the notes to come; he hardly hears the present notes as they pass. But the first time he hears that song, the listener's experience is rich and full. Time swells and slows. His mind, trying to grasp the complex form of the song, comes alive. And then, almost at once, the richness fades. As he beings to understand the form of the song, the song's magic begins to disappear. This is the tragic paradox of our perceptual existence. The effort to grasp the object's form triggers the intense sensory engagement that the success of that effort destroys.

But what if what you felt the first time you heard a song could last forever? What if you discovered an immortal song, a song that never gets old? Listening to it provides you with an experience of unfading freshness, of unending novelty. To imagine such music is to imagine a device for stopping time within time. This music would be like a hand grasping your heart, like a lover's kiss, fused with a star's immortality.

Ron Horning:

By consumerist ideology, nothing could be more enjoyable than a shopping spree. What could be better than exercising one's freedom of choice, over and over again, to get new and exciting things, to have novel experiences tailored especially for our personal delight?

To capitalize on convenience and autonomy in a consumer marketplace, we must first allow our desires to be commodified and suppress the desires that don't lend themselves to commodification. We have to permit more intrusive surveillance to enjoy the supposed benefits of customization. We have to buy into a quantity-over-quality ethos for aspects of life where it has never made any sense, like intimacy.

For online dating sites, the optimal customer is an oversexed solipsist addicted to novelty. But interacting with the sites doesn't have to be a matter of sitting alone at your computer (or staring into a phone) and attenuating your personal predilections as if they came entirely from within and existed independently of social relations. Instead, it can be a confrontation with how little we know about ourselves and how we might aspire to be sure of even less.

Roger Ebert:

I used to believe it was preposterous that people could fall in love online. Now I see that all relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person. Whether we use our bodies or a keyboard, it all comes down to two minds crying out from their solitude.

Tim Kreider's married friend:

It's not as if being married means you're any less alone.

Nathan Heller:

Average college debt, adjusted for inflation, has tripled since the late nineteen-eighties.

(It's still growing.)

Nicola Clark:

Nearly 40 percent of French 15-year-olds have repeated at least one grade.

Clay Shirky:

Tuition and fees at public four-year colleges went up 72% last decade, even as the market value of a bachelor's degree fell by 15%.

Nathan Heller:

Nielsen data indicate that the most enthusiastic audience for HBO's "Girls" is middle-aged men.

Gretchen Reynolds:

Every single hour of television watched after the age of 25 reduces the viewer's life expectancy by 21.8 minutes.

Arif Hasan:

According to 2006 figures, fully 72 percent of the University of Karachi student body is today female. Among medical students, 87 percent are women, and the figure for architecture and planning is as high as 92 percent.

"Emma Gertlowitz", 11-year-old fan of Nate Silver:

Statisticians are the new sexy vampires, only even more pasty.