Richard Thaler:

Many people love lotteries.

Adam Davidson:

Hollywood is, in some ways, the model lottery industry. [But] even glamour-free industries offer economic-lottery systems. Part of the American post-World War II economic miracle was that most people didn't have to choose between a high-stakes-lottery job or a lousy dead-end one. Strivers were able to dream bigger because they had a solid Plan B. Now, many economists fear that the comfortable Plan B jobs are disappearing. It's not clear what today's eager 23-year-old will do in 5 or 10 years when she decides that acting (or that accounting partnership) isn't going to work out after all.

Dennis Overbye:

The universe will revert to nothingness.

Nothing to nothing.

One day it's all going to seem like a dream.

But who is or was the dreamer?

Matt Heusser:

By the time you turn thirty-five, you'd better have a plan.

Lauren Clark:

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

Jenny Diski:

Eternal sunshine requires a spotty, not a spotless mind. Keep the good stuff, snuff out the bad. So where the Victorians believed in hard experience building character, and the 20th century put its faith in facing demons, we may be looking at a new future of positive forgetting.

David Clark, on Victor Mayer-Schoenberger:

If the gathering, storage, and processing of information puts us all in the center of a digital panopticon, the failure to forget creates a panopticon crossbred with a time-travel machine.

Don't forget about forgetting.