Here, for the foreseeable future, Starbucks remains the "affordable indulgence" Schultz has always described.

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

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs.

Now 12,000 partners had suddenly learned what betrayal really was. Surely, I surmised, they'd be venting on starbucksgossip.com, the website largely of, by, and for Starbucks employees.

In 1876, a man named Henry Wickham smuggled seventy thousand rubber tree seeds out of the rainforests of Brazil and delivered them to Victorian England’s most prestigious scientists at Kew Gardens. Those seeds, planted around the world in England’s colonial outposts, gave rise to the great rubber boom of the early twentieth century -- an explosion of entrepreneurial and scientific industry that would change the world. The story of how Wickham got his hands on those seeds -- a sought-after prize for which many suffered and died -- is the stuff of legend. In this utterly engaging account of obsession, greed, bravery, and betrayal, author and journalist Joe Jackson brings to life a classic Victorian fortune hunter and the empire that fueled, then abandoned, him.

Rule No. 1: Betray your employer before your employer betrays you.
Rule No. 2: Remember what you are selling.
Rule No. 3: Hide your motives. Or, specifically, minimize the appearance of financial interest.

For some, the new era of lightweight, lightning-fast software design is akin to a guerrilla movement rattling the walls of stodgy corporate development organizations. "They stole our revolution and now we're stealing it back and selling it to Yahoo," said Bruce Sterling.

Dick’s novels, reread, invite us to pick one page and draw a thick line across it, separating the novel into before and after the protagonist learns (or believes he has learned) what’s really going on: often we realise, far into the after portion, that we may never know.

America will be a more secure country once it discards the notion that secrecy is equal to strength.

The point was mainly to get people with similar interests but widely different backgrounds talking (and hopefully collaborating) with one another, and it succeeded amazingly well at that.

Most people think the steam engine—that paragon of the Industrial Revolution—was invented in the 18th century, maybe even later. That would be wrong. The first steam engine was actually invented in ancient Rome in about A.D. 60.

The question today, when it comes to alternative fuel technologies is: Will we be like the Romans, or the British?

Yes, he owns a flat-screen television, but he has modified it with a burlap frame. He uses an iPhone, but it is encased in burnished brass. Even his clothing — an unlikely fusion of current and neo-Edwardian pieces (polo shirt, gentleman’s waistcoat, paisley bow tie), not unlike those he plans to sell this summer at his own Manhattan haberdashery — is an expression of his keenly romantic worldview.

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.

Naturally, the helpful Garbage Pail Kids want to assist, so they all steal some sewing machines and begin slapping together nightclubbing dresses for teen whores.

She chats with flamboyant Indonesian transsexuals about their boob jobs and watches Chinese streetwalkers turn away clients because their SUVs aren't nice enough.

From a modern perspective, it might be thought there was an obvious risk in having God demand the sacrifice of Abraham’s son on stage on the very feast day that commemorated the voluntary sacrifice of a human being whose broken body and spilled blood were to be sacramentally ingested. But this seems not to have bothered the friars.

"What we think is superior in retrospect is often what we’re used to, after a lot of money has been invested in it."

The really potent work of art implies a promise to change everything—surely the world can't bear the awareness induced by true art!—that's always renewed and always broken. What reveals the promise as broken is that everyone's now a fan of the art in question, and still the world goes on as before. Hence the backlash. People can still feel, in the face of all evidence, that a new album might change everything; not so a box set.

Public spaces should be inspired centers of civic life and the physical manifestation of the common good. Instead, what we have in America is a nation of places not worth caring about.

The combination of powerful search facilities with the web's facilitation of associative linking is what is eroding Carr's powers of concentration. It implicitly assigns an ever-decreasing priority to the ability to remember things in favour of the ability to search efficiently.

There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.

Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

The danger of the Pentagon’s current approach to technology is that without a clear prioritization, everything seems worthy of investment. In that case, what we’ll get is what we have: a military equipped to deal with a future threat that may never exist, while often lacking the tools to cope with the present.

Today's "information explosion" may seem like an acutely modern phenomenon, but we are not the first generation nor even the first species to wrestle with the problem of information overload. Long before the advent of computers, human beings were collecting, storing, and organizing information: from Ice Age taxonomies to Sumerian archives, Greek libraries to Dark Age monasteries.

Today, we stand at a precipice, as our old systems struggle to cope with what designer Richard Saul Wurman called a "tsunami of data." With some historical perspective, however, we can begin to understand our predicament not just as the result of technological change, but as the latest chapter in an ancient story that we are only beginning to understand.

The idea was to create a database from the published correspondence of four eighteenth-century philosophers and statesmen, Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin, and Jefferson. They wrote so many letters to so many people that a digitized record of all their exchanges would make it possible to trace references through an enormous, transatlantic epistolary network and to show how the Republic of Letters actually functioned as a communication system.

In 1934, Paul Otlet sketched out plans for a global network of computers (or “electric telescopes,” as he called them) that would allow people to search and browse through millions of interlinked documents, images, audio and video files. He described how people would use the devices to send messages to one another, share files and even congregate in online social networks. He called the whole thing a “réseau,” which might be translated as “network” — or arguably, “web.”

The idea that American politics moves in cycles is usually associated with the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., but it has an even longer currency. Ralph Waldo Emerson noted the political oscillations between the party of memory and the party of hope, the party of conservatism and the party of innovation. Henry Adams believed that “a period of about 12 years measured the beat of the pendulum” during the era of the founders. Schlesinger, borrowing from his historian father, estimated that the swings between eras of public action and those of private interest were nearer to 30 years.

What matters more than the length of the cycles is that these swings, between what Schlesinger called periods of reform and periods of consolidation, clearly occur. If we somewhat arbitrarily fix the age of Franklin D. Roosevelt as 1932 to 1968 and the era of Ronald Reagan as 1968 to 2008, a new cycle of American political history — a cycle of reform — is due.

Because idealist generations are unwilling to compromise on moral issues, they've always failed to solve the major social and economic problems of their eras.

Failure is an essential part of the process. "The way you say this is: 'Please fail very quickly -- so that you can try again'," says Mr Schmidt.

“We didn’t speak the language, and we were sparsely equipped,” he recalled. “But we established a rapport with the people. We gave them worm tablets and would ask them politely, in pidgin English, to collect their fecal matter in buckets for us.”

I was describing this to a friend over lunch in Palo Alto. As I was describing this the waiter came up behind me to take our order. I was in the middle of saying "it's very hard to enter the rectum, but once you do things move much faster", only to hear the waiter gasp. Whoops. I tried to explain saying "well, this is about" but with a horrified look he said "I do NOT want to know what this is about! Some people are just not interested in natural history, I guess.