Etay Zwick:

At the best of times, Wall Street provides white noise amidst entrepreneurs' and workers' attempts to actualize their ambitions and projects. We are still learning what happens at the worst of times.

Joel Kotkin:

Britain's welfare state now accounts for nearly one-third of government spending.

Jaron Lanier:

Web 2.0 is a formula to kill the middle class and undo centuries of social progress.

Jeffrey Rosen:

It's often said that we live in a permissive era, one with infinite second chances. But the truth is that for a great many people, the permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances -- no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past. Now the worst thing you've done is often the first thing everyone knows about you.

Christopher Ahlberg, CEO at Recorded Future:

We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.

Nathaniel Persily:

There used to be a theory that gerrymandering was self-regulating. But it's not self-regulating anymore. We have become very good at predicting how people are going to vote. The software is too good, and the partisanship is too strong.

Richard Betts:

In times of change, people wonder more consciously about how the world works.

Virginia Postrel:

In 2008, Americans owned an average of 92 items of clothing, not counting underwear, bras and pajamas.

By contrast, consider a middle-class worker's wardrobe during the Great Depression. Instead of roughly 90 items, it contained fewer than 15.

Kira Cochrane:

Last year, a poll for tissue manufacturer SCA found that 41% of British men and 33% of women don't shower every day, with 12% of people only having a proper wash once or twice a week.

Steven Frank:

Old Worlders have to come to grips with the fact that a lot of things we are used to are going away. Maybe not for a while, but they are.

George Packer:

I see one of the ugliest political periods in my lifetime, which has seen a few.

Martin Wolf:

A lost decade seems quite likely.

Tim Henderson:

After watching their parents -- typically both of them -- work ever longer hours in an increasingly around-the-clock and competitive world, 20-somethings wonder whether their 20s will be the best time of their lives or will be spent doggedly climbing the career ladder.

Tom Friedman:

We're entering an era where being in politics is going to be more than anything else about taking things away from people. It's going to be very, very interesting.

Tony Travers:

London is becoming a First World core surrounded by what seems to be going from a second to a Third World population.

Paul Volcker:

Today's concerns may soon become tomorrow's existential crises.

Paul Krugman:

We are now, I fear, in the early stages of a third depression.

Richard Florida:

We have come to an economic juncture where we must re-examine even our most cherished beliefs.

Jeffrey Carr:

I don't like hype, but hype sells.

Jason Baptiste:

If you spent the money on an original iPod in 2001 on Apple stock ($499), you would have $14,513.78 today.

Nicholas Kristof:

CEOs of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001.

Josh Kraushaar:

Money chases momentum -- not the other way around.

Decius:

The thing that sucks about freedom of speech is that rich people can afford more speech than you can.

D'Angelo Barksdale:

It ain't about right. It's about money.

Molly Young:

The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that the first kind gain momentum from boredom and the second kind don't.

Tara:

Life is about wanting to have, and then getting, and then having, and then, like, wanting more.

Charles P. Pierce:

Truth is what moves the needle. Fact is what sells.

Sarah Silverman:

You're very free if you don't love money.

Decius:

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

John Tierney:

When people were asked to anticipate how much extra money and time they would have in the future, they realistically assumed that money would be tight, but they expected free time to magically materialize.

Zadie Smith:

If it's not for money and it's not for girls -- what is it for? With Zuckerberg we have a real American mystery. Maybe it's not mysterious and he's just playing the long game, holding out: not a billion dollars but a hundred billion dollars. Or is it possible he just loves programming?

Nicholas Kristof:

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976.

Eric Schmidt:

You get a billion people doing something, there's lots of ways to make money. Absolutely, trust me. We'll get lots of money for it.

Ali Dhux:

A man tries hard to help you find your lost camels.
He works more tirelessly than even you,
But in truth he does not want you to find them, ever.

Mark Fletcher:

I fear I spend too much time on the Internet as a crutch to avoid thinking about the crushing sameness of each and every day as well as the black hollowness of my soul.

Andre Agassi:

Even if it's not your ideal life, you can always choose it. No matter what your life is, choosing it changes everything.

David Gelernter:

If this is the information age, what are we so well-informed about?

Hal Varian:

Data are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.

Jeffrey Rosen:

We are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent -- and public -- digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts.

Graeme Wood:

There are times when I would love to cease existing as a person in the eyes of others, and to swim through crowds unnoticed, the way women do in their steel-blue burqas in Herat. Far from being an experience that no one should have, it seems one that everyone should have the choice to have.

Mark Twain:

In my early manhood and in middle-life, I used to vex myself with reforms, every now and then. And I never had occasion to regret these divergencies, for whether the resulting deprivations were long or short, the rewarding pleasures which I got out of the vice when I returned to it, always paid me for all that it cost.

William Deresiewicz:... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Ross Douthat:

In 2006, Gallup asked the public whether the government posed an "immediate threat" to Americans. Only 21 percent of Republicans agreed, versus 57 percent of Democrats. In 2010, they asked again. This time, 21 percent of Democrats said yes, compared with 66 percent of Republicans.

It's a mistake to characterize the survey results in the way that Douthat has done here. According to their framework, shifts in public concern are akin to the way someone might temporarily lose interest in football when their favorite team has a bad year, only to return with great enthusiasm when the team turns things around.

I don't think public concern for civil liberties waxes and wanes like this -- it's more like a permanent slump. It's just not something that drives people to the polls, which is in no small part what drives elections in this country.

In 2003, you commented on the Jose Padilla case:

The public pressure on this is the reason they had to go public. Hopefully this will serve as a lesson in the future to those whose family members may be detained without reason. The Internet is your friend. Get as many eyes on the situation as possible. You now have the power to do that.

But clearly it's not something that motivates a critical mass of voters; this was shown just this month in the case of Russ Feingold, whose leadership on civil liberties failed to move his constituents to action:

Incidentally, the "libertarians" are out showing their true colors on the Reason blog, talking about how it's "almost" a shame and ignorantly overemphasizing Citizen's United in favor of the countless times Feingold has stood for individual rights - likely because none of those people actually cares about individual rights enough to have ever followed a Congressional debate on that subject closely enough to recognize his name or understand his actual position.

The variation expressed by the Gallup surveys is attributable to the subject's utility as a weapon of the opposition party. But it's a blunt weapon -- more like a relay baton, really, or one of those toy rifles that a majorette or color guard might use in their routines.

Other policy issues surely exhibit similar patterns (of shifting to the opposition party). By analyzing large scale, fine-grained temporal data, such as the time devoted to a topic on TV news, I'd expect you could find additional sub-patterns relating to shifts in interest relative to the election cycle. Consider Obama's presidential campaign as the opposition candidate --

The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism. It's because that's who we are. That's what we're protecting.... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Civil Liberties As A Pet Concern of the Opposition

Michael Shnayerson:

The tiger team was a social gang. To stay in the gang, you had to play the game.

Mary Meeker:

Do humans want everything to be like a game?

Peter Aldhous:

If someone is momentarily flashed the word "ugly", it will take them longer to decide that a picture of a kitten is pleasant than if "beautiful" had been flashed.

Jeremy Peters:

A spokesman for Mr. Biden, Jay Carney, said the vice president was unavailable to be interviewed about his portrayal in The Onion.

Adam Thierer:

The high-tech policy scene within the Beltway has become a cesspool of backstabbing politics, hypocritical policy positions, shameful PR tactics, and bloated lobbying budgets.

Perhaps we shouldn't find it surprising that so many players in the tech policy arena now look to throw each other under the Big Government bus to gain marketplace advantages.

Sarah Palin:

The view is so much better from inside the bus than under it.

Michael Osinski:

Oyster farmers eat lots of oysters, don't they?

T.J. Rodgers:

Washington's money is never free.

Pi Yijun:

Things that you used to not be able to sell, you could sell again.

Jessica Vascellaro:

Last September, Google launched its new ad exchange, which lets advertisers target individual people -- consumers in the market for shoes, for instance -- and buy access to them in real time as they surf the Web .... The further step ... would be for Google to become a clearinghouse for everyone's data, too. That idea ... is still being considered, people familiar with the talks say. That would put Google -- already one of the biggest repositories of consumer data anywhere -- at the center of the trade in other people's data.

Jules Winnfield:

The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be a shepherd.

Jim Cortada:

Think about data like a whole bunch of sheep on a hillside -- you gotta get them in. Herders use dogs. Businesses are increasingly using software to get the data herd in.

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.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Eric Schmidt:

You get a billion people doing something, there's lots of ways to make money. Absolutely, trust me. We'll get lots of money for it.

William Gibson:

Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because ... Google is made of us ...

Andrew Dermont:

Consumers today are knowingly and unknowingly providing businesses with more data than they've ever been capable of collecting before. Internet entrepreneurs, privacy analysts, and business consultants alike believe that for the next fifty years, capitalism around the world will (for better or worse) be focused on sussing out what all this data actually means.

Our growing use of digital technology is creating so much "data exhaust," as industry insiders call it, that entire economies are and will continue to form purely around the collection, preservation, protection, implementation, and -- most importantly -- understanding of our data.

No one knows how long it will take before businesses begin implementing the kinds of complex feedback systems that biologists see in nature, but for now one thing is for certain: the world is sitting at the foot of what will continue to be an unfathomable mountain of data with the potential to profoundly revolutionize much more than just the way that businesses target us with pesky advertisements. There is already so much data, in fact, that the very thought of beginning to mold it into useful information is enough to make one throw their hands up in the air and give up.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

IBM's Jim Cortada:

Think about data like a whole bunch of sheep on a hillside -- you gotta get them in. Herders use dogs. Businesses are increasingly using software to get the data herd in.

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.

Jules Dupuit:

Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

John Kay:

The market economy is the only game in town. But there are many different kinds of market economy. The key to understanding why market economies have outperformed planned societies is not recognition of the ubiquity of greed, but understanding of the power of disciplined pluralism.

Peter Baker:

It is possible to win the inside game and lose the outside game. In their darkest moments, White House aides wonder aloud whether it is even possible for a modern president to succeed, no matter how many bills he signs. It may be that every modern president is going to be, at best, average.

Tim Wu:

I'm interested in the quest for dominance, in industrial warfare. I believe that capitalism, by its nature, is about conflict, and ultimately the life and death of firms.

Mikhail Fridman:

I think that of all the types of human activity, entrepreneurship is in some sense the closest to war.

I think that to become a major, very successful entrepreneur, you really need to be in the right place at the right time -- a lot of things have to coincide. But the most important thing is not how to become a major entrepreneur or head of enormous business projects, but how to become an entrepreneur in general.

The dissemination of the Protestant ethic led to a change in the attitude towards entrepreneurship: people began to think for the first time that an entrepreneurial talent was a gift from God, just like any other. A person who was born with this talent should use it and should accumulate material wealth, to be used not for his own needs, but to the benefit of society.

Flexibility is sometimes perceived as lack of principle. Very often in the public mind, businessmen are amoral, because they are prepared to make friends with yesterday's enemies and unite against the people they were friends with yesterday etc. Such behavior does indeed seem unprincipled. Nevertheless, I think that an ability to determine the thin line between tactics and strategy, tactical and current aims and strategic objectives is a very important quality.

Suzy Hansen:

In a 2008 online poll devised by the British magazine Prospect and the American magazine Foreign Policy, Fethullah Gülen was voted the most significant intellectual in the world.

The Gülen movement reminds people of everything from Opus Dei to Scientology to the Masons, Mormons, and Moonies. He instilled in his followers an almost Calvinist work ethic. To this day, even detractors of the movement will talk about how hard Gülenists work. Their achievements have been remarkable.

Every Afghan I spoke to in Kabul, from politicians to cooks, told me that "the Turkish school" was the best in the city.

"Who's paying for all this?" I asked. "A Turkish businessman," they replied.

The story of the Gülen movement is thus very much the story of Turkey's evolution: religious Muslims using capitalist enterprise to establish a foothold in a country where they'd previously been left behind.

Dan Berrett:

The revelation that hundreds of University of Central Florida students in a senior-level business class received an advance version of a mid-term exam has exposed the widening chasm in what different generations expect of each other -- and what they perceive cheating to be.

The incident has sparked debate and soul-searching far beyond Florida, with some seeing the case as a classic example of the philosophical divide between many students and faculty members about just what constitutes cheating -- and how it can be prevented. Further, it shows just how difficult it can be to stamp out and respond to large-scale incidents of academic dishonesty.

What has been most disturbing to some -- and perhaps the real engine driving the continuing national interest in the case -- is the response and defense mounted by the students. To some observers, the incident has amplified fears about the moral character of the generation that is now coming of age.

The even larger problem is the social dynamic put in place by this larger permissiveness, she said. "When people get the idea that everyone cheats, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy," she said. Among individuals, cheating can become habitual. As the attitude that it is common grows more widespread, so does the toll it exacts.

Garrison Keillor:

I dropped in to a broadcasting school last fall and saw kids being trained for radio careers as if radio were a branch of computer processing. They had no conception of the possibility of talking into a microphone to an audience that wants to hear what you have to say. I tried to suggest what a cheat this was, but the instructor was standing next to me.

Douglas Haddow:

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us.

Ellen Barry:

Juries were supposed to change Russia. Introduced amid a raft of liberal reforms in 1993, they shifted power away from the state structure and thrust it into the hands of citizens. Juries introduced real competition into Russia's courts, granting acquittals in 15 to 20 percent of cases, compared with less than 1 percent in cases decided by judges.

But the state has never been happy about leaving the fate of high-profile prosecutions in the hands of ordinary people.

"The law doesn't work. People in power can do whatever they want with the law," said Iosif L. Nagle. "It is always unpleasant when some of your illusions are destroyed."

Lauren Clark:

It's good to have a plan, but if something extraordinary comes your way, you should go for it.

Tux Life:

I won't say I wanted to be put on a jury for a criminal case, but when the opportunity arose I certainly welcomed it.

...

Apparently, once the prosecution realized that there was a hung jury, they became nervous that the tide would turn, as is frequently the case and as was the trend in this case as well according to our votes, from guilty to not guilty. Rather than risk losing a conviction and/or having a retrial, they dropped their demand that the defendant be tried as an adult and allowed him to take a plea of "strongarm robbery," which would put him in something called a Youthful Offenders Program, which is a sort of transitional detention from boyhood to adulthood which requires that its residents get a GED and learn skills that will keep them from coming back into the legal and penal systems. It's one of those pesky rehab facilities the crime-and-punishment crowd loves to hate. The judge was very happy with this result because he didn't want to see this boy get sent off to a man prison and either not survive or come out more serious about crime than his very serious but seemingly unconsidered youthful indiscretion. He would also pay the victim $2,000 in restitution. The judge even told us that he had predicted a hung jury, that the evidence, while convincing, just wasn't solid enough in either direction.

What you truly have is a proverbial sausage factory: it's incredibly messy, nothing seems to make sense, nothing looks good or reasonable or even real, but at the end of the line there is something like justice. It doesn't always look right. It doesn't always feel right. It doesn't even always taste right. But it's at least palatable. And no matter how it is, it's never for a lack of sincerely trying.

Mark Twain:

In my early manhood and in middle-life, I used to vex myself with reforms, every now and then. And I never had occasion to regret these divergencies, for whether the resulting deprivations were long or short, the rewarding pleasures which I got out of the vice when I returned to it, always paid me for all that it cost.