Paul Arden:

The problem with hoarding is that you end up living off of your reserves. Eventually you become stale.

Lee Unkrich:

Our goal is to screw up as fast as possible.

Edward Luce:

The question now is whether the firefighters can become architects.

Steve Bellovin:

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Marco Arment:

Making a product better often requires removing features. If I could never remove features, I'd never add any.

Tom Friedman:

For 60 years you could really say being in politics, being a political leader, was, on balance, about giving things away to people. That's what you did most of your time.

I think we're entering an era -- how long it will last, I dare not predict -- where being in politics is going to be more than anything else about taking things away from people. And that shift from leaders giving things away to leaders taking things away, I don't think we know what that looks like over time. It's going to be very, very interesting.

David Cotton:

It's not just spray paint, it's a new mindset.

Martin Wolf:

Will the austerity itself deliver the growth, as some hope? I doubt it. The hair shirt alone will wear badly.

Ratnesh Sharma et al:

Although the information technology and livestock industries may seem completely disjoint, they have complementary characteristics that we exploit for mutual benefit.

An exchange:

Charlie: Don't you think we've milked this for about as much as we can, Richard?

Richard: I hope not, Charlie. I hope not.

A banker:

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

Joanna Newsom, on Lady Gaga:

You listen to the music, and you just hear glow sticks.

Janelle Brown:

Thanks to Joe Biden's surreptitious efforts, a few glow sticks and a customer or two on Ecstasy could be all it takes to throw a party promoter in jail for 20 years.

Ira Glass:

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

Campbell Brown:

The simple fact is that not enough people want to watch my program, and I owe it to myself and to CNN to get out of the way so that CNN can try something else.

Video Professor:

Try my product!

Straw Man:

Buy my shit!

Clay Shirky:

Nothing will work, but everything might.

The job of the next decade is mostly going to be taking the raw revolutionary capability that's now apparent and really seeing what we can do with it.

Mark Bowden:

Journalism, done right, is enormously powerful precisely because it does not seek power. It seeks truth.

Paul Graham:

I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

"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.

Michael Lopp:

We're in a world where you can find anything you want, which is great, except when you realize there's a lot of everything.

Randall Munroe:

What if I want something more?

Merlin Mann:

Everything ... and "More?"

Thomas Powers:

Is more what we really need?

An exchange:

Flight Attendant: More anything?
Jerry Seinfeld: More everything!

Caterina Fake:

It's an incredible amount of data.

danah boyd:

Big Data is made of people.

John Brockman:

Many of the people that desperately need to know, don't even know that they don't know.

Lopp:

You can sit back and be force-fed the decisions and opinions of others. Or ... You can have an opinion.

Homer:

Can't someone else do it?

Lopp:

You don't have the time to have an opinion about everything, but someone has the time.

Louis CK:

Maybe we need some time ...

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.

Decius:

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

Joe Nocera:

They just want theirs.

Judith Hertog:

I can't help smiling. This is all I've wanted her to acknowledge. She's an imposter, a swindler, just like me.

Benjamin Franklin:

It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.

Welcome To Your Very Own Everything And More Store

Fred Wilson:

Privacy is pretty black and white. It either is or it isn't. And trying to have it both ways won't work.

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:

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

Kate Ray:

Groups aren't necessarily smart or powerful, but they could be. It isn't enough to get a bunch of people together in a room or on a website with a great vision of what they could accomplish. The group's potential hinges on its structure.

Steve Bellovin:

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Clay Shirky:

Nothing will work, but everything might.

An exchange with Mark Fletcher:

"Share something."

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. There, I said it. Are you happy now?

John Givings:

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

Errol Morris:

Often there has been an incredible tension between what people want to hear, and the stories that I have presented. I remain unapologetic.

Michael Haneke:

Audiences are having mainstream cinema and television touch on only the surface of things, and they get irritated when confronted by a more exacting gaze into the depths of our existence.

James Miller:

The cyber threat has outpaced our ability to defend against it.

The scale of compromise, including the loss of sensitive and unclassified data, is ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Ben Bernanke:

Ultimately, what makes us happy? What makes our lives satisfying in the long run?

If Thomas Jefferson thought it was important to facilitate the pursuit of happiness, maybe we should think a bit about what that means in practice.

We can look inward for answers, but, at least for someone trained as a social scientist, the most direct way to tackle the question is just to go out and ask people -- lots of people.

danah boyd:

You can count until you're blue in the face, but unless you actually talk to people, you're not going to know why they do what they do.

Nicholas A. Christakis & James Fowler:

Each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%.

Decius:

Paul Graham asks what living in your city tells you. Living in the north Perimeter area for 6 odd years now has told me that everybody makes way, way more money than I do. It's not inspiring so much as it makes you sympathize with class warfare.

Randall Munroe:

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?

Bernanke:

When you are working, studying, or pursuing a hobby, do you sometimes become so engrossed in what you are doing that you totally lose track of time?

That feeling is called flow.

If you never have that feeling, you should find some new activities -- whether work or hobbies.

Winifred Gallagher:

You can't be happy all the time, but you can pretty much focus all the time. That's about as good as it gets.

Charles Munger:

The way to win is to work, work, work, work and hope to have a few insights.

Caterina Fake:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Atul Gawande:

Let us look for the positive deviants.

Bernanke:

Ultimately, life satisfaction requires more than just happiness. Sometimes, difficult choices can open the doors to future opportunities, and the short-run pain can be worth the long-run gain. Just as importantly, life satisfaction requires an ethical framework. Everyone needs such a framework. In the short run, it is possible that doing the ethical thing will make you feel, well, unhappy. In the long run, though, it is essential for a well-balanced and satisfying life.

Freeman Dyson:

You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Lauren Clark:

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

My First Dictionary:

Today's word is disillusioned.

Virginia Postrel on Obama:

The pleasure and inspiration may be real, but glamour always contains an illusion. The image is not entirely false, but it is misleading.

James Lileks:

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

The Economist on Obama, from November 2008:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

George Packer, this week:

What if people around the world want more than a humble adjustment in America's tone and behavior?

What if American overtures to nasty regimes fail, because those regimes have a different view of their own survival?

Randall Munroe:

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?

An exchange:

Ernie: Is there anything fluffier than a cloud?

Big Tom: If there is, I don't want to know about it.

Christopher Alexander:

A building or town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed by the timeless way.

The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of any person ... It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.

Anne Frank:

As long as you can look fearlessly at the sky, you'll know that you're pure within and will find happiness once more.

Elizabeth Rubin:

A sudden wail pierced the night sky. It was Slasher, an AC-130 gunship, firing bullets the size of Coke bottles. Flaming shapes ricocheted all around the village. Flaming rockets flashed through the sky. Thunder rumbled and echoed through the valley. Then there was a pause. Slasher asked Caroon whether the insurgents were still talking. Kearney shouted over to Yarnell in his ditch, "You picking anything up?" Nothing. More spitting rockets.

"O.K., I've done my killing for the week. I'm ready to go home."

Frank Chimero:

No matter who said what, it's possible they were wrong, and even if they were right, sometimes pursuing your own divergent ideas leads to something brand new.

Charles Munger:

The way to win is to work, work, work, work and hope to have a few insights.

It makes sense to load up on the very few good insights you have instead of pretending to know everything about everything at all times. The wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have the odds. And the rest of the time, they don't. It's just that simple.

Sven Birkerts:

Concentration can be had, but for most of us it is only by setting oneself against the things that routinely destroy it.

Concentration is no longer a given; it has to be strategized, fought for. But when it is achieved it can yield experiences that are more rewarding for being singular and hard-won. To achieve deep focus nowadays is also to have struck a blow against the dissipation of self; it is to have strengthened one's essential position.

David Foster Wallace:

After the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank.

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.

Gary Wolf:

You might not always have something to say, but you always have a number to report.

Donald G. McNeil, Jr:

For every 100 people put on treatment, 250 are newly infected.

danah boyd:

You can count until you're blue in the face, but unless you actually talk to people, you're not going to know why they do what they do.

Birkerts:

What we had imagined to be the something more of experience is created in-house by that three-pound bundle of neurons, and that it is not pointing to a larger definition of reality so much as to a capacity for narrative projection engendered by infinitely complex chemical reactions. No chance of a wizard behind the curtain. The wizard is us, our chemicals mingling.

David Shields:

Please, for the love of god, don't read the citations.

Tony Judt:

The question is not going to be, Will there be an activist state? The question is going to be, What kind of an activist state?

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.

Decius:

This is the road to despotism. This is the fevered dream of theocracy. This is America.

M.T. Anderson:

Every culture has its own characteristic mode of anti-intellectualism -- some stronger, some weaker. Our American brand, paradoxically, equates knowledge and complexity with boredom. Thought becomes shameful. Best if not talked about.

David Foster Wallace:

One thing TV does is help us deny that we're lonely. The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.

Tim Kreider's married friend:

It's not as if being married means you're any less alone.

n+1:

From the first, and in no small part because of its fervent supporters, it has felt less like a technology and more like a social movement -- like communism, like feminism, like rock and roll. An ideology we could call webism.

One of the mysteries of webism has always been what exactly it wanted, and one of the paradoxes that emerged during the long death of print was that the webists wanted to help. ... They meant this in all sincerity; their anger at the publishers for failing to "use" them properly was proof of this. But to urge the "use" of something was to think of it as merely a technology. It was to forget that the amazing and powerful thing about the web was precisely that it was not a toaster; it was not a hammer. The web could not simply be "used."

The web is not your dream of the web. It is a real thing, playing out its destiny in the world of flesh and steel -- and pixels, and books. At this point the best thing the web and the book could do for one another would be to admit their essential difference. This would allow the web to develop as it wishes, with a clear conscience, and for literature to do what it's always done in periods of crisis: keep its eyes and ears open; take notes; and bide its time.

Nir Rosen:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Pascal Bruckner:

A revolution comes when what was taboo becomes mainstream.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

danah boyd:

Never forget that Big Data is soylent green. Big Data is made of people.

Roger Highfield:

The reality is that, despite fears that our children are "pumped full of chemicals", everything is made of chemicals.

Phil Agre:

Data is made of bits. But data isn't just numbers -- it's also a way of thinking about the relationship between the abstract territory inside computers and the concrete territory outside them. Data has meaning -- it represents the world.

boyd:

Privacy is completely intermingled with Big Data. But in our obsession with Big Data, we've forgotten to ask some of the hard critical questions about what all this data means and how we should be engaging with it.

Cordelia Dean:

This technology might be useful, even life-saving. But it would inevitably produce environmental effects impossible to predict and impossible to undo. There are those who suggest humanity should collectively decide to turn away from some new technologies as inherently dangerous.

boyd:

The Uncertainty Principle doesn't just apply to physics. The more you try to formalize and model social interactions, the more you disturb the balance of them.

Felix Salmon:

His method ... became so deeply entrenched -- and was making people so much money -- that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart.

boyd:

Just because technology can record things doesn't mean that it brings attention to them. So people rely on being obscure, even when technology makes that really uncertain. You may think that they shouldn't rely on being obscure, but asking everyone to be paranoid about everyone else in the world is a very very very unhealthy thing.

Rattle:

Paranoia about the conspiracy is always justified. It's just usually misplaced.

Marc Lacey:

In other words, there has to be a line people will not cross, even for a suitcase full of cash.

Privacy and Publicity in the Context of Big Data

Whit Diffie and Susan Landau:

We are moving from a world with a billion people connected to the Internet to one in which 10 or 100 times that many devices will be connected as well. Particularly in aggregation, the information reported by these devices will blanket the world with a network whose gaze is difficult to evade.

Vannevar Bush, 1945:

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

Benjamin Franklin:

It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.

Bruce Schneier:

Will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good?

Gary Wolf:

If you want to replace the vagaries of intuition with something more reliable, you first need to gather data. Once you know the facts, you can live by them.

Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira:

Follow the data.

David Lynch:

So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?

David Clark:

Don't forget about forgetting.

Gary Wolf:

When we quantify ourselves, there isn't the imperative to see through our daily existence into a truth buried at a deeper level. Instead, the self of our most trivial thoughts and actions, the self that, without technical help, we might barely notice or recall, is understood as the self we ought to get to know. Behind the allure of the quantified self is a guess that many of our problems come from simply lacking the instruments to understand who we are. Our memories are poor; we are subject to a range of biases; we can focus our attention on only one or two things at a time. We don't have a pedometer in our feet, or a breathalyzer in our lungs, or a glucose monitor installed into our veins. We lack both the physical and the mental apparatus to take stock of ourselves. We need help from machines.

Drew Endy:

My guess is that our ultimate solution to the crisis of health-care costs will be to redesign ourselves so that we don't have so many problems to deal with.

The Data-Driven Life