Michael Schmidt and Nicole Perlroth:

Hackers are increasingly exploiting the lack of security to gain access to the nation's most critical infrastructure.

Jon Kalish:

The kids in Hacker Scouts are not breaking into computer networks. They make things with their hands.

Susan Landau:

What are the personal consequences for employees who allow data breaches to happen?

Until people lose their jobs, nothing is going to change.

Nicole Perlroth and Nick Bilton:

A common saying among security experts is that there are now only two types of American companies: Those that have been hacked and those that don't know they've been hacked.

Ellen Nakashima:

Cyber-espionage, which was once viewed as a concern mainly by U.S. intelligence and the military, is increasingly seen as a direct threat to the nation's economic interests.

Christopher Soghoian:

On the one hand the government is freaking out about cyber-security, and on the other the U.S. is participating in a global market in vulnerabilities and pushing up the prices.

David Chavern, Chief Operating Officer at the US Chamber of Commerce:

It's nearly impossible to keep people out. The best thing you can do is have something that tells you when they get in.

It's the new normal.

George Chidi:

I'm consistently surprised by what can be learned from a friendly conversation with the right person. The only thing more surprising has been what I've learned without talking to a soul.

Brian Eno:

Most of the smart people I know want nothing to do with politics.

Barack Obama:

It's not a fun time to be a member of Congress.

Decius:

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

Brian Eno:

Whatever the reasons for our quiescence, politics is still being done -- just not by us.

We expect other people to do it for us, and grumble when they get it wrong. We feel that our responsibility stops at the ballot box, if we even get that far. After that we're as laissez-faire as we can get away with.

What worries me is that while we're laissez-ing, someone else is faire-ing.

Decius:

Civil liberties really matter, and nobody cares.

Teju Cole:

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather. A bomb whistled in. Blood on the walls. Fire from heaven.

David Brooks, via Tyler Cowen:

Our system of higher education is like a giant vacuum cleaner that sucks up some of the smartest people from across the country and concentrates them in a few privileged places.

The highly educated cluster around a few small nodes. The magnet places have positive ecologies that multiply innovation, creativity and wealth. The abandoned places have negative ecologies and fall further behind.

This sorting is self-reinforcing, and it seems to grow more unforgiving every year. ... Half of the jobs in university political science programs went to graduates of the top 11 schools. That is to say, if you have a Ph.D. from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and so on, your odds of getting a job are very good. If you earned your degree from one of the other 100 degree-granting universities, your odds are not. These other 100 schools don't even want to hire the sort of graduates they themselves produce. They want the elite credential.

Marge Simpson:

Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.

Decius:

Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.

James Suroweicki:

The only way to win the game is simply not to play.

Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

What is to become of those of us past schooling, who are aware of these planes? Are we to dredge on with pink shades over our blue eyes? What other choice do we have, become hermits and form our own seceded blue colony?

Luke Mogelson:

Daowood's method was different. When a fighting-age male struck him as suspicious, the colonel would use his thumbs and index fingers to pull open both of the man's eyelids. Then he would lean close and stare searchingly. Usually, after several seconds, as though he had suddenly found precisely what he was looking for, Daowood would declare, in mock surprise, "He's Taliban!"

It was a joke, of course -- one that mostly made fun of the Americans. A few years ago, the coalition embarked on an ambitious enterprise to record in an electronic database the biometric information of hundreds of thousands of Afghan citizens, and a hallmark of American patrols has subsequently been the lining up of villagers to digitally register their eyes and fingerprints. Daowood's faux iris scan was in part an acknowledgment of the A.N.A.'s inferior technology. But it was also a dig at the coalition's somewhat desperate reliance on technology. Where Daowood's interactions with villagers were always intimate, it is hard to imagine a more clinical and alienating dynamic between two people than that of the NATO service member aiming his Hand-held Interagency Identity Detection Equipment at the face of a rural Afghan farmer. In such moments, the difference in the field between the U.S. and Afghan soldier is far starker than that of the foreigner and the native. It is more akin to the difference in the ocean between a scuba diver and a fish.

David Foster Wallace:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

Jared Diamond:

Americans' thinking about dangers is confused. We obsess about the wrong things, and we fail to watch for real dangers.

Charles Simic:

I found myself worrying. As my fellow Serbs say, inside each one of us lurks a turd.

Robert Krulwich:

Where, they wondered, did that poop come from?

Tim Cook:

There are always things that are unknowable.

Richard Thaler:

My advice for young researchers at the start of their career is... Work on your own ideas, not your advisor's ideas (or at least in addition to her ideas). And spend more time thinking and less time reading.

Try writing the first paper on some topic, not the tenth, and never the 50th.

Stanley McChrystal:

You have to not lose confidence in what you are doing. You have to be able to go to the edge of the abyss without losing hope.

Rafiq Kathwari:

The world is vast. Plumb
your own universe.

Nathaniel Rich:

The deeper you dive, the more you get paid. In his second or third year an apprentice may be promoted, or "broken out," to a full-time diver. His salary will increase to between $60,000 and $75,000. He will start as an "air diver," diving as deep as 120 feet while breathing regular air. Jobs at this depth might include retrieving tools from the worksite, or cutting and retrieving the polypropylene cord that runs between the surface vessel and the underwater worksite. Next the diver will be assigned to more complex jobs below a hundred feet, for which he must breathe mixed gas in order to avoid suffering the effects of nitrogen narcosis while working with heavy machinery. A full-time mixed-gas diver can earn more than $100,000 a year. He will perform jobs at ever greater depths, with higher degrees of technical difficulty, until his diving supervisor deems him ready to graduate to saturation diving. Sat divers can make $200,000 a year. Sat's where it's at.

Nizar Qabbani:

Dive into the sea, or stay away.

Jesse Hicks:

Wherever there's a system, an established order, someone will have an incentive to uphold it. And someone else will have equal incentive to break it.

Wayne Curtis:

When you see the gait cameras, try goose-stepping past. Leg up high, knee unbent, toes skyward. It's wholly unnatural and artificial, but should mask the way you really walk. No one will ever know it's you.

Tim Parks:

Nobody requires the existence of a standard and a general pressure to conform more than the person who wishes to assume a position outside it.

Sasha Weiss:

It's not the fiction of Beyonce's performance that angers us, but the fear that underneath the pomp and idealism our political leaders are con men, telling us a story about ourselves that may not be true.

John Givings:

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

T.S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Michael Finkel:

Moving is what nomads do.

Ariana Kelly:

As phone companies systematically remove pay phones, Amish and Mennonite communities have been building, or rebuilding, their own. Referred to as "phone shanties" and hidden in the woods, behind barns and chicken coops, these "community phones" are intended to isolate contact with the external world and lessen the potential for such contact to divert people's attention from faith, family, and community.

Wade Davis:

Cultures do not exist in some absolute sense; each is but a model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of intellectual and spiritual choices made, however successfully, many generations before.

A lama once remarked that Tibetans do not believe that Americans went to the moon, but they did. Americans may not believe, he added, that Tibetans can achieve enlightenment in one lifetime, but they do.

Paul Saffo:

Some years back, the five year-old daughter of a venture capitalist friend announced upon encountering an unfamiliar entree at the family table, "It's new and I don't like it." That became her motto all through primary school, and for all I know, it still is today.

Stephen Colbert:

Fear is like a drug. A little bit isn't that bad, but you can get addicted to the consumption and distribution of it. What's evil is the purposeful distribution of fear. As Paul said when he was faced with the gom jabbar, "Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration."

Robert Frost:

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.

Moxie Marlinspike:

Jobs at software companies are typically advertised in terms of the difficult problems that need solving, the impact the project will have, the benefits the company provides, the playful color of the bean bag chairs. Likewise, jobs in other fields have their own set of metrics that they use to position themselves within their domains.

As a young person, though, I think the best thing you can do is to ignore all of that and simply observe the older people working there.

They are the future you. Do not think that you will be substantially different. Look carefully at how they spend their time at work and outside of work, because this is also almost certainly how your life will look. It sounds obvious, but it's amazing how often young people imagine a different projection for themselves.

Look at the real people, and you'll see the honest future for yourself.

Attributed to Abraham Lincoln:

Whatever you are, be a good one.

Two from Colin Powell:

Be careful what you choose. You may get it.

You can't make someone else's choices. You shouldn't let someone else make yours.

From Rumsfeld's Rules:

It is easier to get into something than to get out of it.

Career Advice

Barbara Kruger op-art in Friday's NYT.

Barbara Kruger is an artist who works with pictures and words.

Previously, on MemeStreams:

Usually declarative or accusatory in tone, these phrases posit an opposition between the pronouns "you" and "we," which satirically refer to "men" and "women." These humorous works suspend the viewer between the fascination of the image and the indictment of the text while reminding us that language and its use within culture to construct and maintina proverbs, jobs, jokes, myths, and history reinforce the interests and perspective of those who control it.

For Sale