Tim Wu:

I write about business in the way that writers have traditionally written about war. 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.

David Axelrod:

We have to deal with the world as we find it.

Paul Krugman:

The main reason Mr. Obama finds himself in this situation is that two years ago he was not, in fact, prepared to deal with the world as he was going to find it. And it seems as if he still isn't.

James Surowiecki:

Opposing the new [health care] law while reaping the benefits of Medicare is essentially saying, "I've got mine -- good luck getting yours."

Joe Nocera:

They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.

Dave Winer:

Everyone has a scam. This year the scam is to grab all the user's data and resell it.

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.

Paul Buchheit:

When you are at some place as successful as Google, you start to think you do everything right.

Jay Rosen:

Ninety percent of everything is crap, but that's nothing novel. There's just more everything now.

Paul Buchheit:

One of the downsides of having worked on something like [Gmail] that was notable is that everyone keeps expecting that you are going to work on that again.

Merlin Mann:

It takes a lot of patience and it takes a lot of self-awareness to be open to the fact that you may become popular about something that you didn't want to become popular about.

At a certain point, you don't get to pick that anymore.

Tim Wu:

The government has conferred its blessing on monopolies in information industries with unusual frequency. Sometimes this protection has yielded reciprocal benefits, with the owner of an information network offering the state something valuable in return, like warrantless wiretaps.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

"Leonard Nimoy":

It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth?

The answer ... is No.

Charles P. Pierce:

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

Paul Krugman:

It's true that the PowerPoint contains nice-looking charts showing deficits falling and debt levels stabilizing. But it becomes clear, once you spend a little time trying to figure out what's going on, that the main driver of those pretty charts is the assumption that the rate of growth in health-care costs will slow dramatically. And how is this to be achieved? By "establishing a process to regularly evaluate cost growth" and taking "additional steps as needed." What does that mean? I have no idea.

Col. Lawrence Sellin:

I don't hate PowerPoint. In fact, I use it often. I do object to its use as a crutch or a replacement for serious thinking. Also, the overuse of PowerPoint can give the illusion of progress, when it is really only motion in the form of busy work. It can confuse the volume of information with the quality of information.

George Packer:

Last week, a local reporter asked the Republican Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, Pat Toomey, why tax cuts should be expected to improve the economy when real incomes actually dropped after the original Bush tax cuts. According to the Times, Toomey "brushed aside" the question with the reply that he "did not believe the data." How convenient for him!

David Phillips:

Once you've told the big lie, you have to substantiate it with a sequence of lies that's repeated.

Peter Norvig:

Using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table: You can do very bad things with it.

C. J. Chivers:

One day in spring 1968, after a skirmish in a gully near Khe Sanh, Gunnery Sergeant Elrod found an AK-47 beside a dead North Vietnamese soldier. He claimed it as his own. This was not a trophy. It was a tool.

A few weeks later, Gunnery Sergeant Elrod was walking across a forward operating base near Khe Sanh with his AK-47 slung across his back.

A lieutenant colonel stopped him.

"Gunny, why the hell are you carrying that?" he asked.

"Because it works," Elrod replied.

Slim Charles:

It's what war is, you know? Once you in it ... you in it. If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we gotta fight!

The Main Driver

Barack Obama:

The question is -- can we afford to borrow $700 billion?

Frank Rich:

That's a good question, all right, but it's not the question. The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich.

You know things are grim when you start wishing that the president might summon his inner Linda McMahon.

Noteworthy:

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

A banker:

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

Jules Dupuit:

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

Nouriel Roubini:

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

Etay Zwick:

During the last economic "expansion" (between 2002 and 2007), fully two-thirds of all income gains flowed to the wealthiest one percent of the population. In 2007, the top 50 hedge and private equity managers averaged $588 million in annual compensation. On the other hand, the median income of ordinary Americans has dropped an average of $2,197 per year since 2000.

Tony Judt:

Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?

We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it.

The question is, What do we do now, in a world where, in the absence of liberal aristocracies, in the absence of social democratic elites whose authority people accept, you have people who genuinely believe, in the majority, that their interest consists of maximizing self-interest at someone else's expense? The answer is, Either you re-educate them in some form of public conversation or we will move toward what the ancient Greeks understood very well, which is that the closest system to democracy is popular authoritarianism. And that's the risk we run. Not a risk of a sort of ultra-individualism in a disaggregated society but of a kind of de facto authoritarianism.

What we need is a return to a belief not in liberty, because that is easily converted into something else, as we saw, but in equality. Equality, which is not the same as sameness. Equality of access to information, equality of access to knowledge, equality of access to education, equality of access to power and to politics.

Decius:

I said I'd do something about this, and I am.

The Capacity To Question

Alan K. Simpson:

It's time to lay it out on the table and let the American people start to chew on it.

Ken Doctor:

It's a box that, once you look inside, you can't not look.

Frank Rich, quoting Robert Frank:

When we reward financial engineers infinitely more than actual engineers, we "lure our most talented graduates to the largely unproductive chase" for Wall Street riches.

Bill Bonner and Lila Rajiva:

"Stocks for the long run," "Globalization is good." We repeat slogans to ourselves, because everyone else does. It is not so much bad luck we want to avoid as being on our own.

Peter Baker:

In the days leading up to the 1994 midterm elections, Clinton mocked Republicans for promising to balance the budget while cutting taxes, saying, "They're not serious." In our conversation, Obama used some variation of the phrase "they're not serious" four times in referring to Republican budget plans.

Nicholas Kristof:

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

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.

Eric Lipton, Mike McIntire, and Don Van Natta Jr.:

While the Chamber of Commerce boasts of representing more than three million businesses, and having approximately 300,000 members, nearly half of its $140 million in contributions in 2008 came from just 45 donors.

Noteworthy:

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

Decius:

Your right to freedom of speech is an inalienable right. Even if you are rich. That's what an inalienable right is.

Tim Wu:

Market power is rarely seized so much as it is surrendered up, and that surrender is born less of a deliberate decision than of going with the flow.

Mark Twain:

It is desire to be in the swim that makes political parties.

Clay Shirky:

Here's a 21st century question: What is Wikipedia made of?

We are living through a shock of inclusion, where the former audience is becoming increasingly intertwined with all aspects of news, as sources who can go public on their own, as groups that can both create and comb through data in ways the professionals can't, as disseminators and syndicators and users of the news.

This shock of inclusion is coming from the outside in, driven not by the professionals formerly in charge, but by the former audience. It is also being driven by new news entrepreneurs, the men and women who want to build new kinds of sites and services that assume, rather than ignore, the free time and talents of the public.

This a change so varied and robust that we need to consider retiring the word "consumer" altogether, and treat consumption as simply one behavior of many that citizens can now engage in. The kinds of changes that are coming will dwarf those we've already seen, as citizen involvement stops being a set of special cases, and becomes a core to our conception of how news can be, and should be, part of the fabric of society.

Evgeny Morozov:

If anything, Iran's Twitter Revolution revealed the intense Western longing for a world where information technology is the liberator rather than the oppressor, a world where technology could be harvested to spread democracy around the globe rather than entrench existing autocracies.

Julian Assange:

We must understand the key generative structure of bad government. We must develop a way of thinking about this structure that is strong enough to carry us through the mire of competing political moralities and into a position of clarity.

John B. Judis:

This election suggests to me that the United States may have finally lost its ability to adapt politically to the systemic crises that it has periodically faced.

When America finally recovers, it is likely to re-create the older economic structure that got the country in trouble in the first place.

America needs bold and consistent leadership to get us out of the impasse we are in, but if this election says anything, it's that we're not going to get it over the next two or maybe even ten years.

Steve Coll:

A democracy is strengthened when its citizens are confronted with the raw truths that follow from the choices of their elected leaders. Whether WikiLeaks will prove over time to be a credible publisher of such truths is another question. If WikiLeaks cannot learn to think efficiently about its publishing choices, it will risk failure, not only because of the governmental opponents it has induced but also because so far it lacks an ethical culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media.

Trevor Butterworth:

It is time to stop thinking about the Internet as a kind of liberation theology. The key issue facing everyone in the next decade is figuring out how to use the Internet and how to discern its societal benefits from its over-hyped Utopian promises.

Zadie Smith:

We know what we are doing "in" the software. But do we know, are we alert to, what the software is doing to us? Is it possible that what is communicated between people online "eventually becomes their truth"? Is it really fulfilling our needs? Or are we reducing the needs we feel in order to convince ourselves that the software isn't limited?

Dean R. Snow:

It's really easy to kid yourself.

Edward Wyatt and Tanzina Vega:

Privacy advocates are pushing for a "do not track" feature that would let Internet users tell Web sites to stop surreptitiously tracking their online habits and collecting clues about age, salary, health, location and leisure activities.

Marketers hate the idea.

In a conversation last week at The New York Times, Eric Schmidt said that the explosion in online consumer monitoring was increasing friction about how strict the privacy limits should be. And, he added, "it's going to get a lot worse."

Ian Malcolm:

You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

Om Malik:

Rapleaf sells pretty elaborate data that includes household income, age, political leaning, and even more granular details such as your interest in get-rich-quick schemes.

Andy Greenberg:

American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents.

A warning:

If you are ever approached by a bunch of over-eager white guys in a white van who try to sell you ("cheap!!!") a set of surround-sound speakers straight out of the van, ... mock them laughingly and offer to sell them some dot-com stock.

I'm Here is a love story about the relationship between two robots living in LA. The film is written and directed by Spike Jonze. Andrew Garfield and Sienna Guillory are in the lead roles, and the soundtrack includes original music by Sam Spiegel and original songs by LA-based artist musician Aska Matsumiya and other emerging musicians.

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.

Mark Pilgrim:

In the end, how many 25-year friends can you hope to make in one lifetime? How many do you really need?

I'm Here

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.

Libby Purves:

There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.

Roger Ebert:

I love to wander lonely streets in unknown cities. To find a cafe and order a coffee and think to myself -- here I am, known to no one, drinking my coffee and reading my paper. To sit somewhere just barely out of the rain, and declare that my fortress.

Virginie Tisseau:

I ride the tram because every day it takes me to a place less familiar.

Decius:

Noticing is easier in a foreign place because mundane things are unusual. It's the sameness of the familiar that closes minds.

Sterling Hayden:

Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

Christina Hendricks:

No man should be on Facebook.

Rahm Emanuel:

We have to play the game.

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?

Jaron Lanier:

If you love a medium made of software, there's a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else's recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!

Steve Coll:

All wars are terrible, but some must be fought.

Col. Lawrence Sellin:

It doesn't matter how inane or useless ... Once it is part of the battle rhythm, it has the persistence of carbon 14.

Alberto Manguel:

What is created when an artist sets out to create? Does a new world come into being or is a dark mirror of the world lifted up for us to gaze in?

We live in the grip of this immemorial and contradictory injunction: on the one hand, not to build things that might lead to idolatry and complacency; on the other, to build things worthy of memory -- "to put into verse," as Dante says, "things that are hard to conceive."

David Clark:

Don't forget about forgetting.

Rebecca Brock:

You can't even remember what I'm trying to forget.

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.

John Givings:

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

Kurt Schwenk:

I guarantee that if you had a 10-foot lizard jump out of the bushes and rip your guts out, you'd be somewhat still and quiet for a bit, at least until you keeled over from shock and blood loss owing to the fact that your intestines were spread out on the ground in front of you.

Frank Chimero:

Quiet is always an option, even if everyone is yelling.

Michael Lopp:

Bright people often yell at each other.

n+1:

"This is a protest against the skeptics!" retorts a 30-something man with a soul patch. He hands us a leaflet. "Get out of the new road if you can't lend a hand! This is a demonstration! Read our program!"

But the leaflet is blank.

Zadie Smith:

We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? I fear I am becoming nostalgic. I am dreaming of a Web that caters to a kind of person who no longer exists. A private person, a person who is a mystery, to the world and -- which is more important -- to herself.

Perhaps Generation Facebook have built their virtual mansions in good faith, in order to house the People 2.0 they genuinely are, and if I feel uncomfortable within them it is because I am stuck at Person 1.0. Then again, the more time I spend with the tail end of Generation Facebook the more convinced I become that some of the software currently shaping their generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.

Those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don't look more free, they just look more owned.

Monica J. Harris:

As in any social trap, when everybody acts in their self-interest, a negative collective outcome ensues. I don't want to be part of the problem any more.

Virginia Postrel:

We can certainly survive without another pair of shoes, a beach vacation, or an iPad. We just imagine we'd be happier with them. Sometimes we are. But even the most successful purchases rarely live up to our daydreams, which edit out all the flaws and aggravations. At the very least, we get used to what we have. The thrill of novelty wears off, and we start dreaming of something else.

But even the most seemingly materialistic daydreams -- the transformed life we imagine in a new dress, a new car, a new house -- allow us to rise above the here and now, projecting ourselves into an idealized future. In the process, we learn truths about who we are, what we desire, and who we might become. Those things may matter only to our minds, but that doesn't make them any less valuable or any less real.

Roger Scruton:

There is a strong argument to be made that the Facebook experience, which has attracted millions of people from all around the world, is an antidote to shyness, a way in which people otherwise cripplingly intimidated by the venture outwards into society are able to overcome their disability and enjoy the web of affectionate relationships on which so much of our happiness depends. But there is an equally strong argument that the Facebook experience, to the extent that it is supplanting the physical realm of human relationships, hypostatizes shyness, retains its principal features, while substituting an ersatz kind of affection for the real affection that shyness fears. For by placing a screen between yourself and the friend, while retaining ultimate control over what appears on that screen, you also hide from the real encounter -- denying the other the power and the freedom to challenge you in your deeper nature and to call on you here and now to take responsibility for yourself and for him.

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.