Ian Morris:

Humans may all be much the same, wherever we find them, but the places we find them in are not. Geography is unfair and can make all the difference in the world.

Michael Greenberg:

Tom's apartment building had been completed just before the global bust but still seemed unfinished, with thick cables dangling from the hallway ceilings. At the building's entrance was a minuscule glass room, like a military checkpoint, every inch of which was taken up by a bare mattress and a TV. A man lay on the mattress, apparently drunk. "Security," explained Tom.

As we drove to the airport, I thought of Italo Calvino's line about how a traveler arriving in a new city finds a part of himself that he did not know he had. "The foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."

Julian Assange:

When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realization dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like.

Trevor Butterworth:

The statement that "a good watch is a watch that tells the time well" only has meaning in a society where timing is everything, where we have ritualized and sanctified time keeping.

George Russell:

We have made our tools, and in turn our tools have made us. The world seems ready made for us as we move from one size box to another, and graduate from gadget to gadget. The great majority of us are no longer thinkers, but choosers. Novelty scarcely seems to stand a chance. Yet once and a while, we get a hint that the world is out there, waiting for us.

When no artificial light is present humans experience what is called "divided sleep", which is a period of intense sleep followed by a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night during which you would be awake and active. This is then followed by a "second sleep" which is a lighter, dream filled state which lasts until morning. People on long hiking trips can begin to experience this after a week of being in the wilderness. Artificial light has changed the most basic way that we live.

Stephen Budiansky:

The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me.

Marc Gunther:

We need food and oxygen. We don't need The Food Network and Oxygen.

Leeane Jensen, fitness manager at Bakar Fitness, on patrons' reaction to a cable TV outage:

It was an uproar. People said: 'That's what we're paying for.'

Margaret Talbot:

The unobserved life is so totally worth living.

William Gibson:

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

danah boyd:

Big Data is made of people.

Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President of Engineering & Research at Google:

We are mortified by what happened.

G.W. Schulz:

The Department of Homeland Security, with its multitude of databases, even came up with a mascot to teach bureaucrats the need for responsibly handling personal information, known as "Privacy Man." He dons a superhero mask and costume.

Kenneth R. Harney:

Don't feel guilty about it. Don't think you're doing something morally wrong.

Martin Marks:

For those of you who continue to insist on sending e-mails longer than three (3) sentences, here is a Wikipedia entry on haiku. Reformat your e-mails accordingly, as in this example:

I am busy now;
The Internet has stolen
So much precious time.

Barack Obama:

In a big, messy democracy like this, everything takes time. And we're not a culture that's built on patience.

Penelope Trunk:

Stop talking about time like you need to save it. You just need to use it better.

Ben McGrath:

The problem with publishing some stories that are two thousand times as important as others is that it no longer makes sense to display them in reverse chronological order.

Stephen Colbert:

I doubt that many people in American politics are acting on the facts. Everybody on both sides is acting on the things that move them emotionally the most.

Alex Clark:

If you stop believing in the stories you're telling, an injection of childlike innocence might be exactly what you need.

Daniel Gilbert:

Antibiotics are a godsend, but just how many pills should God be sending?

Jerry Weinberger:

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

danah boyd and Eszter Hargittai:

We examine the attitudes and practices of a cohort of 18- and 19-year-olds surveyed in 2009 and again in 2010 about Facebook's privacy settings.

Our results challenge widespread assumptions that youth do not care about and are not engaged with navigating privacy.

We find that, while not universal, modifications to privacy settings have increased during a year in which Facebook's approach to privacy was hotly contested.

We also find that both frequency and type of Facebook use as well as Internet skill are correlated with making modifications to privacy settings.

In contrast, we observe few gender differences in how young adults approach their Facebook privacy settings, which is notable given that gender differences exist in so many other domains online.

Christina Hendricks:

No man should be on Facebook.

Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

Decius:

The ship has already sailed on the question of whether or not it's reasonable for the government to collect evidence about everyone all the time so that it can be used against them in court if someone accuses them of a crime or civil tort. This is just another brick in the wall.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

Facebook privacy settings: Who cares?

Jeffrey Rosen:

How best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing?

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.

Facebook's nearly 500 million members, or 22 percent of all Internet users, spend more than 500 billion minutes a month on the site.

Erica Naone:

It's stunning to contemplate how large a responsibility the company has for information belonging to a growing number of people around the world.

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.

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.

Neil Howe:

If you think that things couldn't get any worse, wait till the 2020s.

Paul Volcker:

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

The Web Means the End of Forgetting

Noteworthy:

Jihad is the new punk.

Jon Caramanica:

What good is punk with nothing to be mad about?

Rebecca Willis:

Is there any sight more comical than a punk in a heat wave?

An exchange:

Ernie: Is there anything fluffier than a cloud?

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

Noteworthy:

Don't give me "The Clash" and claim you're punk.

Peter R. Neumann:

[They] frequently experience a tension between traditional [culture] ... and ... [contemporary] society. Extremism gives them an identity that allows them to rebel against both.

John Boehner:

Don't let those little punk staffers take advantage of you.

Amanda Terkel:

Barney Frank is now distributing "Little Punk Staffer" buttons to Hill aides.

Rattle:

I have a standing offer of $10 for the first person to bring me one of these "Little Punk Staffer" pins.

Abaddon:

Do you know why our stupid congress keeps passing brain dead laws concerning technology? Because some punk kid like you breaks into some soccer mom's network, makes her think you're some super genius hacker that's going to start world war 3 with the click of a mouse and she calls her congressman who is just as clueless as she is and they make more laws that make it illegal to think ...

Advice from a passerby:

Listen to some old school PUNK ROCK

Flynn:

Long live the Sex Pistols!

Tom Henderson, editor of mathpunk.net:

Mathematics is like unicorn anatomy. You imagine this thing, and it doesn't exist, yet it still comes with facts. I know how many legs a unicorn has.

Stefanie:

The Cold War Unicorns Play Set allows you to play out the intense struggle between two global superpowers in the majestic fantasy world of the Unicorn! Can the Communist Unicorn's horn of classless social structure hold up against the Freedom Unicorn's hooves of capitalist opportunity? Each hard vinyl unicorn is 3-3/4" tall with articulated joints for all sorts of dramatic poses.

Decius:

Did I mention that Unicorns are real?

David Pogue:

Not long from now, Facebook will be a frighteningly centralized database containing the information of about a half-billion people.

Kurt Partridge:

I don't think the field has really realized ... how informative it can be.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Erica Naone:

The site's 400 million users have an average of 130 friends each, and just this social graph data is tens of terabytes in size.

The site has long been the largest photo-sharing site on the Web ...

It's stunning to contemplate how large a responsibility the company has for information belonging to a growing number of people around the world.

Kristina Grifantini:

To address privacy concerns, they designed SoundSense so that ... a user can tell the software to ignore any sounds deemed off limits.

Tanzeem Choudhury:

A system that can recognize sounds in a person's life can be used to search for others who have the same preferences.

Christina Hendricks:

No man should be on Facebook.

Cordelia Dean:

There are those who suggest humanity should collectively decide to turn away from some new technologies as inherently dangerous.

S.C.:

Like Facebook, the dollar may not be the best system around, but it's what everyone else uses, hence it's hard to displace.

David Petraeus:

Hard is not hopeless.

danah boyd:

4chan is ground zero of a new generation of hackers who are bent on hacking the attention economy. These attention hackers are highlighting how manipulatable information flows are.

Jeff Bezos's grandfather:

One day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever.

Drake Bennett:

Whether they want to or not, people quickly begin to take things for granted.

Jeff Bezos:

Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.

Gifts are easy -- they're given, after all. Choices can be hard.

You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

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.

Paul Kafasis:

It's got arrogance and self-conceit, followed by comeuppance, which is my absolute favorite kind of uppance.

David Petraeus:

Hard is not hopeless.

Schumpeter:

One of the problems with the corporate world is that all the incentives are towards producing platitudes, and none of them towards plain speaking. We need to invent a way of penalizing people for producing guff.

Daniel Plainview:

I like to think of myself as an oilman. As an oilman, I hope that you'll forgive just good old fashioned plain-speaking.

Penelope Trunk:

Stop talking about time like you need to save it. You just need to use it better.

Colin Marshall:

Who doesn't want to be more productive?

Merlin Mann:

People wanted nonsense. People wanted something to distract them for a little while.

Peter Bregman:

Sure I might want to watch an episode of Weeds before going to sleep. But should I? It really is hard to stop after just one episode. And two hours later, I'm entertained and tired, but am I really better off? Or would it have been better to get seven hours of sleep instead of five?

So why is this a problem? It sounds like I was super-productive. Every extra minute, I was either producing or consuming.

But something -- more than just sleep, though that's critical too -- is lost in the busyness. Something too valuable to lose.

Boredom.

Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that's where creativity arises.

Molly Young:

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

Caterina Fake:

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

Nancy Folbre:

We constantly exhort young people to invest in their human capital. But investments in human capital, like those in real estate, don't always yield a reliably high market rate of return.

Middle-class culture in the United States rests on the precepts of human capitalism -- invest in your own skills and those of your children, and the market will reward you. These precepts now seem shakier than they have in the past. No wonder middle-class spirits, as well as incomes, are sagging.

David Foster Wallace:

Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

Sarah Silverman:

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

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment.

Peter Maass:

It little matters whether we fill our tanks at BP or Exxon stations.

What matters is that we visit gas stations less often.

Klinkenborg:

Every now and then I meet someone in Manhattan who has never driven a car.

I used to wonder at such people, but more and more I wonder at myself.

William Deresiewicz:

For too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going.

Who can answer questions, but don't know how to ask them.

Who can fulfill goals, but don't know how to set them.

Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they're worth doing in the first place.

What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen.

What we don't have are leaders.

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

Clay Shirky:

Nothing will work, but everything might.

Rebecca Brock:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes."

I tell them, It's going to take everything.

The Cultural Anomaly Of Our Moment