Maciej Ceglowski:

I hope to make you believe data collection is a trade-off. It hurts the people whose data you collect, but it also hurts your ability to think clearly. Make sure that it's worth it!

Patrick Tucker:

Deputy Director Andrew Hallman already has plans to hire a chief data officer to spearhead the development of advanced analysis techniques, to "manage the data science cadre and provide standards for development APIs that allow various applications to talk to each other," he said. (It's safe to say it will be the sexiest job in data science outside of Facebook.)

David Cowan:

It's not that sexy when the room is full of people just like you.

Emily Nussbaum:

I naively remarked that Jaguar couldn't have paid: who would want to be the brand of sexual coercion? "You'd be surprised," he said.

Kirt McMaster:

It's like Coke and Pepsi now. That's the war these companies are fighting. It's not a sexy business anymore.

Jennifer Percy:

Like Marlow on his way up the Congo, these men seemed to experience a disturbance in their Western consciousness. They had vastly overestimated their use. Their service was respected but insignificant. These were men who arrived with a stark idea of good versus evil, who thought of themselves as heroes, and found themselves turning in circles.

Marcelo Rinesi:

Just as any user feels their computer to be a fairly unpredictable device full of programs they’ve never installed doing unknown things to which they’ve never agreed to benefit companies they’ve never heard of, inefficiently at best and actively malignant at worst (but how would you now?), cars, street lights, and even buildings will behave in the same vaguely suspicious way.

Nicole Perlroth:

After a similar attack by another Chinese state-affiliated hacking group on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2011, the chamber believed it had rid hackers from its network only to discover months later that an office printer and even a thermometer in one of its corporate apartments were still sending information back to computers in China.

Anna Eshoo:

Even a deli meat scale was compromised.

Tim Kreider:

At some point you ... have to consider the possibility that the life you have right now might pretty much be it.

Deji Olukotun:

It's an insecure bundle of information following people around on the Web.

Zeynep Tufekci:

It's a pity that casinos have better scrutiny of their software than the code running our voting machines, cars and many other vital objects, including medical devices and even our infrastructure.

Emily Nussbaum:

I wonder if there's a way for us to be less comfortable as consumers ... to crave purity, naive as that may sound.

Zerodium:

Who are ZERODIUM's customers? ZERODIUM customers are major corporations in defense, technology, and finance, in need of advanced zero-day protection, as well as government organizations in need of specific and tailored cybersecurity capabilities.

Fredric Jameson:

I merely want to remind us that cyberspace is a literary invention and does not really exist, however much time we spend on the computer every day.

Anna Eshoo:

Even a deli meat scale was compromised.

Emily Badger:

Improvements in road safety since the 1990s haven't been evenly shared. The biggest declines in fatalities have occurred among the most educated. As for people 25 and older with less than a high school diploma, fatality rates have actually increased over time.

Walter Kirn:

The desire to have not is a desire of the haves.

Mat Honan:

Cars are giant, inefficient, planet-and-people-killing death machines.

So go fuck a tailpipe if you love cars so much. Your love for cars doesn't supersede the lives of 1.2 million people who die in automobile accidents every year. It's not more important than the energy savings we'll get from not manufacturing 60 million or so vehicles every year that spend most of their time idle. Turned off. Parked.

John Tierney:

Here's some perspective: To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger's round-trip flight between New York and London, you'd have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. If you sit in business- or first-class, where each passenger takes up more space, it could be more like 100,000.

Diana Saverin:

After graduation, the idea of moving to a city and getting an office job scared me much more than, say, bears. I could see the days soaring by there: a fluorescent-lit routine repeating itself for years.

Ken Auletta:

Larry Page suffered from Sergey Brin envy. Page had turned into what he had always admonished Googlers not to become: a bureaucrat. He was comfortable, and that made him uncomfortable.

William Deresiewicz:

We're all in showbiz now, walking on eggshells, relentlessly tending our customer base. We're all selling something today, because even if we aren't literally selling something (though thanks to the Internet as well as the entrepreneurial ideal, more and more of us are), we're always selling ourselves.

Andrew Hill:

If this is revolutionary, it may be the most tedious revolution yet.

Wesley Morris:

Donald Trump is the pathogenic version of Obama, filling his supporters with hope based on a promise to rid the country of change.

Mike Berland, on Donald Trump:

He fills the Twitter stadium every day.

Wesley Morris:

We had never really had a white president until we had a black one.

Paul Krugman:

Race made Reaganism possible.

Wesley Morris:

We're a vertical nation moving horizontally. We're daring to erase the segregating boundaries, to obliterate oppressive institutions, to get over ourselves. The transition should make us stronger -- if it doesn't kill us first.

Decius:

It is our failure to avoid embracing fear and sensationalism that will be our undoing. We're still our own greatest threat.

Marilynne Robinson:

Fear operates as an appetite or an addiction. You can never be safe enough.

Threat Assessment:

Lisa: Uh, are you sure that's safe?
Kearny: Well it ain't gettin' any safer.

William Damon and Anne Colby:

Any democracy requires a minimum level of shared trust to function. We may be approaching that minimum level right now.

Decius:

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.

Diana Kimball:

The thing about sharing is that once you get your hands on a general-purpose tool for collecting and presenting content, it's entirely possible that the audience you're most interested in sharing with will be your future self. Whenever a nominally social tool introduces a single-player, "private" mode, that's a sure sign that the people have spoken. What we wish for exposes us. Many people -- perhaps most -- just aren't ready to have their intentions exposed.

[But] the urge to enrich the Database of Intentions is irresistible.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

David Gelernter:

People ask where the Web is going; it's going nowhere. The Web was a brilliant first shot at making the Internet usable, but it backed the wrong horse. It chose space over time.

Albert Einstein:

The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

Marcia Bjornerud:

This planet is one mysterious peach.

James Gleick:

Some people say vast confusion like it's a bad thing.

Frans de Waal:

We keep assuming that there is a point at which we became human. This is about as unlikely as there being a precise wavelength at which the color spectrum turns from orange into red.

Amanda Petrusich:

American inertia moves in a single direction. There is only one way to ride off into a sunset.

From "Nihilistic Password Security Questions", by Soheil Rezayazdi:

On what street did you lose your childlike sense of wonder?

Rahul Kanakia:

When you go to sleep, you hear your neighbour arguing with his wife through the wall. He wants her to become a dancer, and she wants to sleep for a thousand centuries. You wish you had someone to argue with.

You live on a planet that is covered by a city, and the city has nine trillion inhabitants, and if you repeatedly bump into one of them, then you know that the city has chosen for you.

This is a mystical belief. The city bureaucrats insist that they do no choosing. They insist that the world is cruel and meaningless, and they say the only order is that which arises from a rigidly logical mind.

A-way, A-way, A-way. Some say the world will go on and on, extending into the foreverness, but you don't believe it.

In the meantime, you know that you are lonely.

P. W. Singer and August Cole:

In modern times, wars between sovereign states have generally been left to militaries and government intelligence agencies, but a cyber war will almost assuredly see civilians join the fight.

Micky McManus:

In 2010, ten billion microprocessors were manufactured; we made more transistors than we grew grains of rice.

David Gelles:

N.H.T.S.A. estimates that it has 0.3 staff members for every 100 fatalities in automobile crashes; the F.A.A. has at its disposal over 10,000 staff members for every 100 fatalities on commercial aircraft.

Simon Kuper:

Roads will soon probably kill more people than either AIDS or tuberculosis.

Jonathan Franzen:

They have adopted new technologies in pursuit of greater control, only to feel controlled by them ... They worry, often nostalgically, that they're missing out on something fundamental.

Emily Badger:

The most disadvantaged are more likely -- and have grown even more likely over time -- to die in car crashes than people who are well-off.

Marcelo Rinesi:

Is your self-driving car deliberately slowing down to give priority to the higher-priced models?

Richard Bejtlich:

The ability to inflict asymmetric cost on adversaries ... plays a role in the digital arena.

Dara Lind:

In general, Americans think large societal issues are getting way worse than they actually are.

Alan Jacobs:

The more deeply embedded a person is in biker culture, the more he exists in a kind of parallel dimension, an alternate moral universe with its own laws and mores. That universe is a territorial shame-and-honor culture ...

Aamena Alshamsi et al:

Communication patterns of urban areas exhibit homophilous behavior. More precisely, happy urban areas tend to interact with other happy areas more than they interact with unhappy areas. Similarly, unhappy urban areas tend to interact with other unhappy areas more than they interact with happy areas.

Alene Tchekmedyian:

A Burbank man was charged Tuesday with punching a 78-year-old Costco shopper who confronted him about taking too many Nutella waffles from a sample cart, authorities said. If convicted, he faces up to 11 years in state prison.