Jaron Lanier, whose new book is "destined to become a must-read":

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

Boomer Pinches:

To the Editor:

I very much enjoyed the first 140 characters of David Carr's article, "Why Twitter Will Endure."

Lanier:

I am amazed by the power of the collective to enthrall people to the point of blindness.

Jose Saramago:

If only all life's deceptions were like this one, and all they had to do was to come to some agreement, Number two is mine, yours is number three, let that be understood once and for all, Were it not for the fact that we're blind this mix-up would never have happened, You're right, our problem is that we're blind.

Lanier:

Collectivists confuse ideology with achievement.

David Kilcullen:

People don't get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.

Jean-Luc Godard:

It's not where you take things from -- it's where you take them to.

Lanier:

To be constantly diffused in a global mush is to embrace mundanity.

Michael Agger:

The Web hasn't lost flavor; you've lost flavor.

Decius:

It's the sameness of the familiar that closes minds.

Dave Winer:

I'm sure that's the future. Might be horrible but we're already almost there.

Freeman Dyson:

The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.

Steve Bellovin et al:

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Rivka Galchen:

I recalled hearing tell from my father of a time not so long ago when the term "technological fix" didn't sound dirty and delusional. When my dad was young, Buckminster Fuller and scientists like him were crusaders of the left, heroically engaged in ushering in an utter transformation of society. The humbly engineered new world order would be one of less waste, more justice, less suffering, domed town halls built out of Venetian blinds, and, just maybe, plastic living rooms that happier housewives could simply wash down with a hose. The technological aspirations were well-diagrammed, beautiful, and ludicrous.

Viktor Chernomyrdin:

We wanted the best, but it turned out as always.

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

Matthew Bloch, Amanda Cox, Jo Craven McGinty and Kevin Quealy:

Examine Netflix rental patterns, neighborhood by neighborhood, in a dozen cities.

David Runciman:

The things Bill Clinton loves are politics, hard data and his family, in roughly that order.

Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira:

Follow the 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.

Louis Menand:

People are prurient, and they like to lap up the gossip. People also enjoy judging other people's lives. They enjoy it excessively. It's not one of the species' more attractive addictions ...

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Flynn23:

It is because our own lives have become so bankrupt that we seek the stories of others.

Teresa DiFalco:

Minor drama is the lifeblood of suburbs.

Vladimir Nabokov:

We both, Vasili Ivanovich and I, have always been impressed by the anonymity of all the parts of a landscape, so dangerous for the soul, the impossibility of ever finding out where that path you see leads -- and look, what a tempting thicket! It happened that on a distant slope or in a gap in the trees there would appear and, as it were, stop for an instant, like air retained in the lungs, a spot so enchanting -- a lawn, a terrace -- such perfect expression of tender, well-meaning beauty -- that it seemed that if one could stop the train and go thither, forever, to you, my love ... But a thousand beech trunks were already madly leaping by, whirling in a sizzling sun pool, and again the chance for happiness was gone.

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.

A Peek Into Netflix Queues

Alex Roman:

Architecture through the cinematographic lens. The visual fusion between the third and the seventh arts.

Louis Kahn:

I like English history. I have volumes of it, but I never read anything but the first volume. Even at that, I only read the first three or four chapters. My purpose is to read Volume Zero, which has not been written.

Steve Bellovin et al:

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

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.

Have you seen My Architect?

The Third & The Seventh

Dave Winer:

If you're important enough you shouldn't even pay to use the mobile device.

I'm sure that's the future. Might be horrible but we're already almost there.

Bill Gurley:

Customers seem to really like free as a price point. I suspect they will love "less than free."

Bruce Sterling:

"Poor folk love their cellphones!"

Shana Richey:

We're saving lots of money.

Jules Dupuit:

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

David Foster Wallace:

But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

The Mother Of All Business Models

Rivka Galchen:

Repress a childish hope long enough and it returns in disguise.

The World in 2009:

Someone once accused Craig Venter of playing God.

His reply was, "We're not playing."

Galchen:

I recalled hearing tell from my father of a time not so long ago when the term "technological fix" didn't sound dirty and delusional. When my dad was young, Buckminster Fuller and scientists like him were crusaders of the left, heroically engaged in ushering in an utter transformation of society. The humbly engineered new world order would be one of less waste, more justice, less suffering, domed town halls built out of Venetian blinds, and, just maybe, plastic living rooms that happier housewives could simply wash down with a hose. The technological aspirations were well-diagrammed, beautiful, and ludicrous.

Charles C. Mann:

Minute changes in baseline assumptions produce wildly different results.

Freeman Dyson:

The truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won't come to pass.

Galchen:

The main way you move forward in science is by finding out you were wrong about what you thought you already knew.

Paul Graham:

Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get.

Dyson:

The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people's hopes.

Galchen:

Our fear of what we'll do with scientific knowledge should be dwarfed by the prospect of that knowledge being pursued outside the public's annoying, normalizing, sobering gaze.

Have you seen Sunshine?

Disaster Aversion

Philip Caputo:

Mexico is where facts, like people, simply disappear.

William T. Vollmann:

Across the border, the desert is the same but there are different secrets.

Fernando Diaz Santana:

In Mexico it is dangerous to speak the truth. It is even dangerous to know the truth.

As long as we don't get too deeply into a story, we are safe.

Clifford Geertz:

Having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, he asked, what did the turtle rest on?

Another turtle.

And that turtle?

"Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down."

Caputo:

What began as a war on drug trafficking has evolved into a low-intensity civil war with more than two sides and no white hats, only shades of black. The ordinary Mexican citizen -- never sure who is on what side, or who is fighting whom and for what reason -- retreats into a private world where he becomes willfully blind, deaf, and above all, dumb.

In seeking, much less speaking, the truth about what the Mexican army is up to, one often runs into the paradox of the Mexican reality: something dreadful happens and is then treated as if it hadn't happened. Facts, like people, simply disappear.

"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.

The Fall of Mexico

David Luhnow:

A senior Mexican official who has spent more than two decades helping fight the government's war on drugs summed up recently what he's learned from his long career: "This war is not winnable."

From a cop on "The Wire", on fighting drugs:

"You can't even call it a war. Wars end."

Luhnow:

If the war on drugs has failed, analysts say it is partly because it has been waged almost entirely as a law-and-order issue, without understanding of how cartels work as a business.

Maria Claudia Gomez, on Pablo Escobar's ranch:

"This place is really nice and tranquil."

Luhnow:

Unlike their rough-hewn parents and uncles, today's young traffickers wear Armani suits, carry BlackBerrys and hit the gym for exercise.

Frank Bruni:

Indica was fixated on my friend Ari. I asked her what kind of phone she had.

"A Sidekick," she said.

"Wow," I said. "That's the same kind Brianna has."

"Strippers' phone of choice," she said.

Luhnow:

Several US states like California and Oregon have decriminalized marijuana ... While this strategy may make sense domestically for the US, Mexican officials say it is the worst possible outcome for Mexico, because it guarantees demand for the drug by eliminating the risk that if you buy you go to jail. But it keeps the supply chain illegal, ensuring that organized crime will be the drug's supplier.

David Simon:

As a reporter, I was trying to explain how the drug war doesn't work. And I would write these very careful and very well-researched pieces. And they would go into the ether and be gone. And whatever editorial writer was coming behind me would then write, "Let's get tough on drugs." As if I hadn't said anything. Even my own newspaper. And I would think, "Man, it's just such an uphill struggle to do this with facts."

Viktor Chernomyrdin:

We wanted the best, but it turned out as always.

Saving Mexico

Lydia Davis:

When you're very young, you're usually happy -- at least you're ready to be. You get older and see things more clearly and there's less to be happy about.

Lisa Moore:

It has always been this way. Finite. But at forty-five you realize it.

Davis:

When you slide by it all, so fast, you think you won't ever have to get bogged down in it again -- the traffic, the neighborhoods, the stores, waiting in lines. We're really speeding now. The ride is smooth. Pretty quiet. Just a little squeaking from some metal part in the car that's jiggling. We're all jiggling a little.

David Foster Wallace:

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us. It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

Davis:

My sister came to visit, one time -- I'm thinking of her bags leaning in a group against my furniture. I was nearly paralyzed, not knowing what to do with her or even without her -- I didn't want to leave her alone in a room. I wasn't used to having company, or at least I wasn't used to having her there. After a while the panicky feeling passed, maybe just because time passed.

Davis:

I look across the road here at how still the cows stand, a lot of the time.

Virginie Tisseau:

We carve life into spaces and name them as if they were animals. As if they were people ... as if we owned them.

This is not my home.

Everyone Is Invited

Tony Judt:

During the day I can at least request a scratch, an adjustment, a drink, or simply a gratuitous re-placement of my limbs ...

But then comes the night.

I am occasionally astonished, when I reflect upon the matter, at how readily I seem to get through, night after night, week after week, month after month, what was once an almost insufferable nocturnal ordeal. I wake up in exactly the position, frame of mind, and state of suspended despair with which I went to bed -- which in the circumstances might be thought a considerable achievement.

Hal Finney:

Although ALS is generally described as a fatal disease, this is not quite true. It is only mostly fatal.

I hope that when the time comes, I will choose life.

Carmine Gallo:

Google gatherings often feature a giant timer on the wall, counting down the minutes left for a particular meeting or topic. It's literally a downloadable timer that runs off a computer and is projected 4 feet tall.

The timer exerts a subtle pressure to keep meetings running on schedule.

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.

Sterling Hayden:

What does a man need -- really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in -- and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all -- in the material sense.

Cormac McCarthy:

I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about?

Have you seen "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"?

Night

The CIA and the FBI had been amassing increasingly ominous and detailed clues about potential threats in Kenya, but the State Department bureaucracy still dismissed [the ambassador]. She was even seen by some at the State Department as a nuisance who was overly obsessed with security ...

The practice of netwar is well ahead of theory ...

"The gloves are off," one senior official said.

"After 9/11, the gloves come off."

Is more what we really need?

"You can't talk sense to them," Bush said, referring to terrorists. "Nooooo!" the audience roared.

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

That which keeps us safe also keeps us free ...

Virginians soon will be able to sport vehicle license plates bearing the words "Fight Terrorism" emblazoned in red letters ...

Empathize with your enemy.

He's going to stay in the can until we're through with al-Qaida.

From a cop on "The Wire": "You can't even call it a war. Wars end."

The most basic way to rob terrorism of its potency is to be unafraid of it.

Do you ever have that experience in life where you can see things coming but you don't know what to do about it? Foreign policy is like that, too.

You don't have to be a cynic to believe that the point of the warnings is not to save lives so much as political hides.

If you can force them to have a liberal democracy you can force them to do all kinds of things.