Jeff Atwood:

I can't take slow typists seriously as programmers. When was the last time you saw a hunt-and-peck pianist?

Rebecca Solnit:

The virtual version rips out the heart of the thing, shrink-wraps it, sticks a barcode on, and throws the rest away. This horseman is called Efficiency. He is followed by the horseman called Profitability. Along with Convenience, they trample underfoot the subtle encounters that suffuse a life with meaning.

Ultimately, I believe that slowness is an act of resistance, not because slowness is a good in itself but because of all that it makes room for, the things that don't get measured and can't be bought.

Graeme Taylor:

In all my slow-motion work so far, I've used a static camera to capture a high-speed event. But, I wondered, what would happen if the camera was the fast-moving object? For instance, if you use a 210fps camera at 35mph, on playback at 30fps it'll seem to the observer that they're moving at walking pace -- but everything observed will be operating at 1/7th speed.

A Secret Service analyst:

The experienced ones take their time and slowly bleed the data out.

Megan Garber:

What's inherently wrong with distraction?

The web inculcates a follow your bliss approach to learning that seeps, slowly, into the broader realm of information; under its influence, our notion of knowledge is slowly shedding its normative layers.

Scott Rosenberg:

Wonderful! Slower news -- and at a higher price.

Stefany Anne Golberg:

One apartment filled with dinosaurs is the talk of the town. But a city filled with them is a disaster.

Geoffrey West:

Cities can't be managed, and that's what keeps them so vibrant.

We spend all this time thinking about cities in terms of their local details, their restaurants and museums and weather. I had this hunch that there was something more, that every city was also shaped by a set of hidden laws.

I don't know anything about this city or even where it is or its history, but I can tell you all about it. And the reason I can do that is because every city is really the same.

Sometimes, I look out at nature and I think, Everything here is obeying my conjecture. It's a wonderfully narcissistic feeling.

Warren Breckman:

In the city's labyrinth, invisibility can quickly trump visibility.

Rulers of cities have always had an interest in visibility, both in representing their power and in controlling people by seeing them.

It would be tempting to say that if Le Corbusier embraced an emphatic, even ominous type of visibility, Jacobs insisted on the power of the invisible, the nooks and crannies, the intimate spaces of homes and private lives. But the truth is that Jacobs argued for a different kind of visibility, that of active life in neighborhoods and on busy, pedestrian-friendly streets.

Anonymity is, perhaps, the most universal experience of invisibility within the modern city.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for quite a different schooling. It is a particular and poignant form of freedom to walk a vibrant urban quarter without aim and with openness to all, unobserved, invisible, or more precisely, caught in the shifting, kinetic exchange of sights and sensations ...

The captains of industry also had ambitions to endow the pursuit of profit with noble purpose. The architecture of commercial buildings often reached for monumentality through the use of rich materials and traditional architectural elements. Department stores, those quintessential sites of the emerging urban consumer society, wrapped their truck and barter in layers of ornament and allegory. Philadelphia's Wanamaker's building, now a Macy's, features a towering pipe organ in a multistory atrium -- a Vatican of commerce indeed!

Luc Sante:

As rich in poetry and lore as had been the unreconstructed area on the Left Bank centered around the place Maubert and the place de la Contrescarpe that was... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Geoff Dyer:

Strolling is for tourists and it's exhausting.

Roger Ebert:

Don't you have anything else to do?

Why wait?

Use your card at the CLEARlane to bypass long security waits and be on your way in minutes.

Damon Tabor:

I was on "vacation," part of a small tour group whose members had paid Geoff Hann, the owner of a UK-based company called Hinterland Travel, $3,700 for the pleasure of traveling in a war zone.

There are no backpackers or bus-tour day-trippers in Afghanistan, and proximity to danger is the real essence of a Hann trip. His tour is a chance to court your own demise -- a short walk on the Hindu Kush's dark side. If you were lucky, you would feel more alive at the end. If you weren't? It was best not to think about that.

Andrew Exum:

Everything in Afghanistan is hard, and it is hard all the time.

Ahmed Rashid:

Hamid Karzai is a changed man. His worldview now is decidedly anti-Western. Karzai and the US will not part ways but there is clearly a fundamental and growing tension between them that does not augur well for either the US or Afghanistan.

Anthony Cordesman:

Key elements of the Afghan government have become almost as serious a problem as the Taliban, and it is far from clear that we are fighting the same war.

These are not problems we can afford to keep ignoring.

Philip Gourevitch:

Do doped-up maniacs really go a-maiming in order to increase their country's appeal in the eyes of international aid donors? Does the modern humanitarian-aid industry help create the kind of misery it is supposed to redress?

The amputations brought the peace, which brought the UN, which brought the money, which brought the NGOs. All of them wanted a piece of the amputee action. It got to the point where the armless and legless had piles of extra prosthetics in their huts and still went around with their stubs exposed to satisfy the demands of press and NGO photographers, who brought yet more money and more aid.

Jaron Lanier:

There is no such thing as a neutral Internet leak organization. Anyone who plays the game brings biases into the work.

An exchange with Penelope Trunk:

She said, "It's not like that. There has to be a game or something."

I said, "Okay. You do the game. What should we do?"

She pouted. I did not realize it was part of the game.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard:

China is trying to keep the game going as if nothing has changed, but cannot do so. It dares not raise rates fast enough to let air out of the bubble because this would expose the bad debts of the banking system. The regime is stymied.

Rahm Emanuel:

We have to play the game.

Economist:

Fighting and spying on the frontier is often described as a Great Game, after the 19th-century Russo-British sparring for which the phrase was coined. And on a five-day visit to South Waziristan in December as a guest of the FC--a rare privilege for a foreigner--and in interviews with Wazirs and Mehsuds in Peshawar, Islamabad and Lahore, your correspondent was struck by how many used this phrase, speaking of the crises that periodically buffet the frontier as a "game", and themselves, through their alliances with one power or another, as "players". "It is all a great game," said Rehmat Mehsud, a Waziristani journalist. "The army, the Taliban, the ISI, they are all involved, and we don't know who is doing what."

Mehsuds consider Wazirs slow-witted, mercantile and untrustworthy--"If your right hand is a Wazir, cut it off," advises a Mehsud. Wazirs mainly consider Mehsuds as vagabonds and cattle-rustlers, often quoting as evidence for this a prayer that Mehsud women are said to chant to their infants: "Be a thief and may God go with you!" Mehsuds also quote this, to illustrate their people's cunning and derring-do.

Bethany McLean:

What Goldman doesn't get is that all the murk about the ways it has benefited from public money taps into a deep fear that has long existed among those who think they know Goldman all too well. It's a fear that, as one person puts it, Goldman's "skill set" is "walking between the raindrops over and over again and getting away with it." It is a fear that Goldman has the game rigged, even if no one can ever prove how, not just because of its political connections but also because of its immense size and power. And it is a belief that despite all the happy talk about clients and culture (and, boy, is there a lot of that) the Goldman of today cares about one thing and one thing only: making money for itself. Says one high-level Wall Street executive, "Why do you have a business? Because you have a customer. You have to make an appropriate profit. But is it possible that Goldman has changed from a firm that had customers to a company that is just smart as shit and makes a shitload of money?"

Jon Lee Anderson:

The air stinks heavily of raw sewage, but no one seems to notice.

Babbage:

The first thing is to be rightly suspicious of anything that looks too good to be true. There are consequences for those who succumb to the temptation.

Rebecca Solnit:

The virtual version rips out the heart of the thing, shrink-wraps it, sticks a barcode on, and throws the rest away. This horseman is called Efficiency. He is followed by the horseman called Profitability. Along with Convenience, they trample underfoot the subtle encounters that suffuse a life with meaning.

Brian Stelter:

The debate over the rules ... seems to have resulted in a classic Washington solution -- the kind that pleases no one on either side of the issue.

Bruce Sterling:

It is a godawful mess. This is gonna get worse before it gets better, and it's gonna get worse for a long time. Like leaks in a house where the pipes froze.

Evgeny Morozov:

We all get scared when we find out that the government knows what we browse online -- but we are far less concerned about some private company knowing this. The question we rarely ask is: Why assume that the government won't simply purchase this data from the private sector rather than compile on its own?

Andrew Ross Sorkin:

Legally, the government is allowed to use any publicly available information -- as long as the government wasn't involved in illegally obtaining the information itself.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri:

Most customers aren't aware that the personalized book recommendations they receive are a result of paid promotions, not just purchase-derived data.

Pamela S. Karlan:

Politicians have constitutional responsibilities, too. And if they showed more restraint, judges would not have to intervene so often.

WNYT-TV:

A former FBI agent recently trained all Waste Management drivers, helpers and technicians in Rensselaer and Albany Counties to act as a mobile community watch. Trucks are now armed with a cell phone, camera and incident reports so they'll have accurate information for police and, possibly, prosecutors.

Decius:

One must assume that all garbage is monitored by the state. Anything less would be a pre-9/11 mentality.

Janet Napolitano:

In a sense, this harkens back to when we drew on the tradition of civil defense and preparedness that predated today's concerns.

Chris Dixon:

The carriers are thinking about pushing the edge beyond recommendations to see how they can start turning their records into revenue.

Ken Doctor:

It's a box that, once you look inside, you can't not look.

Jaron Lanier:

A sufficiently copious flood of data creates an illusion of omniscience, and that illusion can make you stupid.

G.L. as Johnson at The Economist:

There's something athletic, soulful even, about the thought of physically diving into a spreadsheet, kicking around in its dusky deep columns, paddling lazily through the surf of numbers, digging for hidden gems among its pivot tables, and coming up for air gasping but ecstatic, with the decimal points cascading down your forehead. It could be a subtle signal to colleagues of the effort you are about to make as you hold your breath and plunge into the numbers. Or maybe it's nothing more than an attempt to romanticise to yourself what is otherwise a soul-deadening activity.

One money manager, on Goldman Sachs:

It's like the Mob who picks up the garbage. You pay their fees, because you need your garbage picked up.

North American Aerospace Defense Command:

Whatever it was, "there is no indication of any threat to our nation."

William Castleman:

Time lapse video of Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse on December 21, 2010 from 1:10 AM EST (6:10 GMT) to 5:03 AM EST (10:03 GMT) from Gainesville Florida.

via w1ld and Decius:

Amazing Spectacle: Total Lunar Eclipse Monday Night

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse

Joyce Wadler:

Instead of using phrases like "clean up this mess," "restore order" or anything that involves the words "barn" or "sty," you might say, "Hey, kids, how about I remove this wrapping paper and we build a cool Mies van der Rohe skyscraper with your new Legos?"

Philip Gourevitch:

The scenes of suffering that we tend to call humanitarian crises are almost always symptoms of political circumstances, and there's no apolitical way of responding to them -- no way to act without having a political effect. Moving from mess to mess, the aid workers in their white Land Cruisers manage to take credit without accepting blame, as though humanitarianism were its own alibi.

Monster Supply Store:

With spine-shuddering pleasure we hereby announce the grand reopening of Hoxton Street Monster Supplies. After extensive refurbishment, we now stock a pharmacopoeia of different types of fear, a complete range of edible human preserves and everyday household essentials like Fang Floss and Zombie Mints. So we invite clients old and new, living and dead to come and discover why we've been the store of choice for discerning monsters for over two hundred years, and will be the same forevermore.

Kalpish Ratna:

It's not just the Nepalis who shit in the water in Haiti. Everybody does. The 1.3 million homeless send their excrement scudding into the water.

Haiti, with its vast displaced population and its misery of want and despair, was cholera waiting to happen, ever since the magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake of Tuesday, 12 January 2010.

One money manager, on Goldman Sachs:

Of course we do business with them. We have to. It's like the Mob who picks up the garbage. You pay their fees, because you need your garbage picked up.

Chuck Klosterman:

A lot of modern life is exactly like slaughtering zombies. The Internet reminds of us this every day.

This is the zombies' world, and we just live in it. But we can live better.

T. H. Breen:

Insurgencies are not movements for the faint of heart.

Jesse Walker:

The larger the institution with secrets to keep, the more opportunities for leaking there will be.

Paul Graham:

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

Christopher Hitchens:

There is an old Republican saying that "a government strong enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take away everything you have." This statement contains an essential truth that liberals have no right to overlook.

Evgeny Morozov:

As far as long-term developments are concerned, I think that much depends on whether the WikiLeaks saga would continue being a debate about freedom of expression, government transparency or whistle-blowing or whether it would become a nearly-paranoid debate about the risks to national security. Anonymous is playing with fire, for they risk tipping the balance towards the latter interpretation -- and all the policy levers that come with it.

Miguel Helft:

With Facebook's prominence on the Web -- its more than 500 million members upload more than one billion pieces of content a day -- the site's role as an arbiter of free speech is likely to become even more pronounced.

Decius:

The primary consequence of Wikileaks will be the tools, process, and laws that will be used in the future to suppress other leaks.

Tamara Mellon:

People who are over-educated become risk-averse.

Jaron Lanier:

If the political world becomes a mirror of the Internet as we know it today, then the world will be restructured around opaque, digitally delineated power centers surrounded by a sea of chaotic, underachieving openness. Wikileaks is one prototype of a digital power center, but others include hedge funds and social networking sites.

This is the world we are headed to, it seems, since people are unable to resist becoming organized according to the digital architectures that connect us. The only way out is to change the architecture.

If there's one lesson of history, it is that seeking power doesn't change the world. You need to change yourself along with the world.

Decius:

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

Daniel Kennedy:

What Could Gawker Have Done Differently?

Everything.

Fouad Ajami:

In hindsight, we can grasp the cold-blooded and chilling efficiency of the Algerian military. The war to which they summoned their men was in truth a war against the population. There were standing orders for army units to stay in their barracks even as massacres were being committed nearby. The military said that it was important to terrorize the terrorists--which they did, and the Algerian population as a whole in the process. And there were also the "dirty tricks"--the killer squads of the army and the special forces and the Departement du Renseignement et de la Securite (DRS) donning the attire of the Islamists, false beards and all, and taken by helicopter to targeted towns and villages to perpetrate frightful massacres. "Fear must change sides," the commanders exhorted their men. A killer colonel, surveying his command by helicopter, summed up the attitude of the cabal: "We are to spare no dog, no cat, no mules, no donkeys, and naturally, no Islamists. Each one of our soldiers is worth ten Islamists, be vigilant and merciless."

Ian Ayres:

It's good to destabilize your cherished beliefs now and again.

Justin B. Smith:

What would we do if the goal was to aggressively cannibalize ourselves?

James McGirk:

Perhaps the closest analogue to juggalos might be the Tea Party. And perhaps if a collective political consciousness ever blossoms among the juggalos they may find some common ground with the Tea Party and evolve to be the shock troops of a coming proletarian revolution.

Charles Arthur:

This generation of Anonymous members is going to grow up. But the idea won't go away.

Economist:

John Weinman, professor of psychiatry at King's College London, monitored the stress levels of a group of volunteers and then inflicted small wounds on them. The wounds of the least stressed healed twice as fast as those of the most stressed.

A TSA Full-Body Scanner:

Please know: I'm just here to measure your penises. And I'm very, very good at it.

For nearly a decade, lightly-trained TSA employees have been forced to estimate -- to guess, really -- your penis size, based on such factors as height, weight, walking style, and disposition. Frankly, that's asking them to do the impossible. It gratifies me to think that millions of travelers will now be able to fly just a little bit easier, secure in the knowledge of their newly complete and accurate TSA profiles -- all thanks to my precise genital scans. Length, girth, heft, and any major identifying characteristics. Everything but the color; this is America, and we don't do that here.