Thoughts I Live With

• Narratives provide us with the sense that we can understand our world and, crucially, that this understanding provides us with some form of control. So the prospect of inexplicable knowledge generated by automated systems reconfigures our sense of how information functions under changed technological conditions. —Mark Andrejevic

• You don't negotiate with someone who marches into another country, devastates it, killing whoever stands in his way. You get him out, make him pay and see that he is never in a position to do these things again. —Margaret Thatcher

• Faith need not be logical to be meaningful; in fact, the opposite might be true. —Jesse Green

• [A]n unexpectedly quick success creates a false sense of confidence that is then applied to other situations where it is really not warranted. —Nicholas Mulder

• People are realising that their best ideas come from times where they’re engaging with a world beyond short-form content. —Chrissy Ryan

• There is no shared cosmic clock. When you lose yourself in a task, react before thinking, or a crisis unfolds in slow motion, you’re directing your own unfolding of Now. —Jo Marchant

• Narrating trauma fragments how we remember. We recall what we can and what we desperately need to keep ourselves together. —Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

• [T]he more accessible information becomes, the more precious nonpublic information is. The more everybody insta-broadcasts opinions, the dearer is the closely held take. —Anand Giridharadas

• [T]he U.S. capacity for doing things that are strategically counterproductive is vast. —Rosemary Kelanic

• Some militaries are too confident in their own capacity to overwhelm any hostile army; some are drawn from societies that simply look down on their enemies. Discounting the enemy’s ability to adapt is also a trait of megalomaniacal leaders -- many of whom choose advisers who tell them what they want to hear and suppress information that would make them unhappy. —Phillips Payson O’Brien

• We have made our mark on the world, but we have really done nothing that the trees and creeping plants, ice and erosion, cannot remove in a fairly short time. —John Steinbeck + Edward F. Ricketts (AKA: Edward Flanders Ricketts)

• [I]n most oppressive societies, those in power knew that an educated population would only upset the political and economic order. —Carol Anderson

• In a world of bests, good is a relief. Best invites an argument; good is just a suggestion: —Melissa Kirsch

• [T]his Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free. —John F. Kennedy

• It's not so much divide and rule as divide and market. Or divide in order to market. We should be wary of all forms of discourse that are keen to separate our society, to chop us up and categorise us into convenient little boxes. There’s more profit in noticing the ways in which we’re different than there is in noticing the ways in which we’re similar. —John Lanchester

• We have a saying in the movement: Some people you can work with and some people you can work around. But the thing that I want to emphasize is that the calling-in practice means you always keep a seat at the table for them if they come back. — Loretta J. Ross

• [T]he most widely discussed screeds against cultural decline tend to be timed, with almost surgical precision, for publication exactly when culture is at its most vibrant. —Martin Gelin