James Bridle:

Everything should have a history button.

Marc Rotenberg:

It's no surprise that governments and vendors are very enthusiastic. But from a privacy perspective, it's one of the most intrusive technologies conceivable.

David Clark:

Don't forget about forgetting.

Matt Warman:

Users could sue websites for invading their privacy and would have a right to be "forgotten" online, under new proposals from the European Union.

Maria Fife:

It's gotten to the point where they need to be in all of our decisions.
They don't trust us to make good choices on our own.

Dr. Yefim Sheynkin:

Millions and millions of men are using laptops now, especially those in the reproductive age range. Within 10 or 15 minutes their scrotal temperature is already above what we consider safe, but they don't feel it. You can put a pillow beneath your computer and it still won't protect you.

Bill Bryson:

It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung.

Mason, Waters, Wright, and Gilmour:

And you run and run to catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

John Allen Paulos:

In listening to stories we tend to suspend disbelief in order to be entertained, whereas in evaluating statistics we generally have an opposite inclination to suspend belief in order not to be beguiled.

Cordelia Hebblethwaite:

One group was given the lists in 16-point Arial pure black font, which is generally regarded to be easy and clear to read.

The other had the same information presented in either 12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale font or 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale.

The volunteers were distracted for 15 minutes, and then tested on how much they could remember.

Researchers found that, on average, those given the harder-to-read fonts actually recalled 14% more.

Anthony York:

Jenny Oropeza, who died after a long illness last month, was reelected to another term in the state Senate on Tuesday. With more than half of the vote counted, voters in Oropeza's Long Beach district gave her more than 54% percent of the vote. Republican John Stammreich trailed with 40% of the vote.

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.

John Krainer and Stephen LeRoy:

House prices have fallen approximately 30% from their peak in 2006, accompanied by a level of defaults and foreclosures without precedent in the post-World War II era. Many homeowners have mortgages with principal amounts higher than the market value of their properties. In general, though, the rational default point is below the "underwater" point where house price equals the remaining loan balance, and depends on prospects for future house price appreciation and borrower default costs.

Eric Dash and Nelson D. Schwartz:

About 11.5 percent of borrowers are in default today, up from 5.7 percent from two years earlier.

CoreLogic, at the end of Q2 2010:

23 percent of all residential properties with mortgages were in negative equity.

Sara Murray:

Washington, D.C. had the largest share of residents receiving food stamps: More than a fifth, 21.1%, of its residents collected assistance in August. Washington was followed by Mississippi, where 20.1% of residents received food stamps, and Tennessee, where 20% tapped into the government nutrition program.

Paul Krugman:

The whole focus on "focus" is, as I see it, an act of intellectual cowardice -- a way to criticize President Obama's record without explaining what you would have done differently.

John Allen Paulos:

If one considers any sufficiently large data set, meaningless coincidences will naturally arise: the best predictor of the value of the S&P 500 stock index in the early 1990s was butter production in Bangladesh.

John Sides:

If you had one thing, and one thing only, to predict which Democratic House incumbents would lose their seats in 2010, what would you take? The amount of money they raised? Their TARP vote? Their health care vote? Whether they had a Tea Party opponent? A Nazi reenactor opponent?

The best predictor by far is none of those. It is simply how Democratic their district is.

Michael Tomasky:

Democrats would probably do far better to invest $200 million in GOTV operations than in soul-searching, who-are-we projects.

Simon Johnson:

Let us hope the White House has learned from the midterms that there are dire electoral consequences when the president shrinks from directly confronting misleading ideas.

George Packer:

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

Nancy Goldstein:

When Reagan said "There you go again" to Carter during the 1980 presidential debates, voters all over the country said, "At last." It didn't matter whether or not Carter's point about Medicare was legitimate: Reagan's shrugging, monosyllabic response tapped into people's frustration with professional politicians and complicated explanations.

Ian Morris:

When experts disagree so deeply, it usually means that we need fresh perspectives on a problem.

Michael Kinsley:

Joe Scarborough got it right in these pages last week when he argued that the 2010 elections, for all their passion and vitriol, are basically irrelevant. Some people are voting Tuesday for calorie-free chocolate cake, and some are voting for fat-free ice cream. Neither option is actually available. Neither party's candidates seriously addressed the national debt, except with proposals to make it even worse. Scarborough might have added that neither party's candidates had much to say about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (except that they "support our troops," a flabby formulation that leaves Americans killing and dying in faraway wars that politicians won't defend explicitly). Politicians are silent on both these issues for the same reason: There is no solution that American voters will tolerate. Why can't we have calorie-free chocolate cake? We're Americans!

Jasper Rees:

Known to its creators and participating artists as the Underbelly Project, the space, where all the show's artworks remain, defies every norm of the gallery scene. Collectors can't buy the art. The public can't see it. And the only people with a chance of stumbling across it are the urban explorers who prowl the city's hidden infrastructure or employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

That's because the exhibition has been mounted, illegally, in a long-abandoned subway station.

Steven Johnson:

When you share a civic culture with millions of people, good ideas have a tendency to flow from mind to mind, even when their creators try to keep them secret.

The Ministry:

Dear citizen, according to received information, you have been influenced by the destabilizing propaganda which the media affiliated with foreign countries have been disseminating.

Anonymous Official:

It's essential to remember that given the will and the relevant orders, WikiLeaks can be made inaccessible forever.

danah boyd:

Carmen is engaging in social steganography. She's hiding information in plain sight, creating a message that can be read in one way by those who aren't in the know and read differently by those who are.

Marlo Stanfield:

You want it to be one way. But it's the other way.

Alan Kay:

At PARC we had a slogan: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points."

Frank Chimero, in February:

I get excited when I see new tools and I have no idea how to use them.

I look at it and all I see is potential.

Jeff Jarvis, way back in April:

After having slept with her (Ms. iPad), I am having morning-after regrets. Sweet and cute but shallow and vapid.

James Lileks, in April:

The Apple tablet is the Barack Obama of technology. It's whatever you want it to be, until you actually get it.

Leigh "Me Too" Gallagher, seven months later:

When I started to use it -- that's when the love affair ended (or really, failed to kick in).

Jim Motovalli:

Plug-in hybrid and electric cars, it turns out, not only reduce air pollution, they cut noise pollution as well with their whisper-quiet motors. But that has created a different problem. They aren't noisy enough.

The world according to Doug Engelbart:

The chord keyboard is unquestionably far superior to the QWERTY. People did not adopt chording because they lacked the persistence to overcome the mental hurdle of learning it, and they lacked the imagination to envision their lives on the other side of the hurdle. So they sat dumbly, QWERTY in hand, pecking away without satisfaction. It was his duty to carry on the struggle. Eventually all would see the light ...

Randall Munroe, last November:

What if I want something more than the pale facsimile of fulfillment brought by a parade of ever-fancier toys?

To spend my life restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming?

Is there an app for that?

RE: Why I hate my new iPad

Richard Betts:

The sacred concepts of freedom, individualism, and cooperation are so ingrained in U.S. political culture that most people assume them to be the natural order of things, universal values that people everywhere would embrace if given the chance.

Decius:

This is the fevered dream of theocracy. This is America.

Lydia Sweetland:

This is not the American dream. This is not my American dream.

Mark Whitehouse:

Giving up on the American dream has its benefits.

Betts:

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

Roger D. Hodge:

The world is construed out of blood and nothing else but blood. Death is the condition of existence and life is but an emanation thereof. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood. Before man was, war waited for him. The idea that man can be understood is an illusion. All horses possess one soul. What the wolf knows man cannot know.

Vannevar Bush:

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems.

Jon Lee Anderson:

The air stinks heavily of raw sewage, but no one seems to notice.

Bill Bryson:

It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung.

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.

An exchange:

Researcher: How long have you had trouble remembering things?

Patient: That I don't know myself. I can't tell you because I don't remember.

Rebecca Brock:

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

Peter Baker:

The first refuge of any politician in trouble is that it's a communication problem, not a policy problem. If only I explained what I was doing better, the people would be more supportive. Which roughly translates to If only you people paid attention, you wouldn't be kicking me upside the head.

Martin Wolf:

Unfortunately, the Republicans have succeeded in persuading a large enough portion of the American public that if the patient had been left entirely alone, he would be in perfect health today. This is surely a fairy story. But voters naturally pay little attention to calamities averted. They focus only on how far experience falls short of what they desire. Mr Obama gains no credit for the former and much blame for the latter. His aspirational rhetoric no doubt worsened the disappointment.

The president's willingness to ask for too little was, it turns out, a huge strategic error. It allows his opponents to argue that the Democrats had what they wanted, which then failed. If the president had failed to get what he demanded, he could argue that the outcome was not his fault. With a political stalemate expected, further action will now be blocked. A lost decade seems quite likely. That would be a calamity for the US -- and the world.

A blogger at The Economist:

By some measures, America already has a lost decade in its rear-view mirror. A couple more would mean a lost generation. Worst of all, it would mean my generation. I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea.

Of course, the past ten years hasn't been lost in the way that the next ten years might be.

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.

Michael Chabon:

If only there were a game, whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it is too late!

Ezra Klein:

The implicit assumption of these arguments about strategy is that there is, somewhere out there, a workable strategy. That there is some way to navigate our political system such that you enact wise legislation solving pressing problems. But that's an increasingly uncertain assumption, I think.

Decius:

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

Frans de Waal:

The debate is less about the truth than about how to handle it.

Jeffrey Tayler:

A good part of wisdom consists in knowing what to ignore.

Independence comes with a price to be paid, and often a high price, but the rewards of living according to one's instinct and inclination exceed all others.

We must remain students, questioning always, analyzing ever. The important thing is to get moving.

David McRaney:

Thinking about thinking, this is the key. In the struggle between should versus want, some people have figured out something crucial -- want never goes away.

Procrastination is all about choosing want over should because you don't have a plan for those times when you can expect to be tempted.

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.

Paul Graham:

The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.

Decius:

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

Abraham Lincoln:

Whatever you are, be a good one.

Lauren Clark:

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

Dr. King, in 1963:

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

Mark Ames:

A century-old ideological movement, Liberalism: once devoted to impossible causes like ending racism and inequality, empowering the powerless, fighting against militarism, and all that silly hippie shit -- now it's been reduced to besting the other side at one-liners ... Sure there are a lot of problems out there, a lot of pressing needs -- but the main thing is, the Liberals don't look nearly as stupid as the other guys do.

Louis Menand:

Other people's culture wars always look ridiculous.

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.

Ames:

That's it, that's all this is about: Not to protest wars or oligarchical theft or declining health care or crushing debt or a corrupt political system or imperial decay -- nope, the only thing that motivates Liberals to gather in their thousands is the chance to celebrate their own lack of stupidity! Woo-hoo!

Noteworthy:

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

Mark Twain:

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

Ames:

Only now, when Liberal ideals have vanished into mythology and all they stand for is "not as crazy or stupid as Republicans" is it safe to camp out with the Democrats. They put nothing on the line ideologically, which perfectly jibes with this generation's highest value.

The Economist, after election night, 2008:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

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.

Ames:

The Rally To Restore Vanity

On 30 September, MIT and Boston Review co-sponsored a debate on the subject of political speech and campaign finance, featuring Lawrence Lessig, Gabriel Lenz, John Bonifaz, Allison Hayward, and Stephen Ansolabehere. Video of the event is now available.

Lawrence Lessig at the debate:

We don't have a democracy where the Congress depends on people alone anymore.

People have increasingly been replaced by the funders ...

The problem in this Congress is in plain sight.

It is corruption, alive and increasingly sickening.

From a summary of the event:

Just when it seemed the corrosive influence of big money on American politics could not be greater, the Supreme Court gave corporations full license to exercise 'free speech' during campaign season. Renowned legal scholar Lawrence Lessig and his respondents debate the most effective response to the 2010 Citizens United ruling, which, Lessig claims, poses an imminent danger to our democracy.

Lawrence Lessig, in the Boston Review:

Washington is the kind of city where one never writes if one can call, never calls if one can speak, never speaks if one can nod, and never nods if one can wink.

There may be a quid. There may be a quo. But because the two are independent, there is no pro.

Decius in 2010, after the SCOTUS ruling in the Citizens United case:

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

You want an equalizer? Look to the Internet. The idea that in the era of the Internet we need more control over political speech than we did in the era of broadcast media is insane. People have other sources than television ads to decide who to vote for. We need only encourage them to use those sources.

Homer:

Can't someone else do it?

Decius in 2004:

In my experience the answer to bad speech has always been more speech.

Decius in 2010, after the launch of Wiki Voter Guide:

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

Democracy after Citizens United | MIT World