John Borthwick's Quotes from Instapaper

At least as compared to existing legal entities, DAOs present certain operational efficiencies and are currently used by organizations managing over $500m in assets, suggesting that legal regimes should take steps to accommodate their growth and development

Students nowadays seem to want to “place” precisely, to locate precisely, everything about a writer’s work: what he is, what has made him or her what they are, and so on. It seems to me that to imprison it is to deny something very essential about writing. Rather the same thing has taken place in nature, or natural history—the mania to place everything in a precise species or subspecies, to discover exactly how it works, all the rest. I am opposed to the scientization of nature, the reducing of it all to species, ecological distributions, biochemical mechanisms, and so on. I feel this very strongly about writing and writers too. The world wants us caged, in one place, behind bars; it is very important we stay free.

What I like about picking up old books is their enormous variety and the glimpses they can give into past and lost worlds and cultures. I do this quite indiscriminately, with whatever takes my fancy; the returns, in a literary sense, are infinite, but difficult to categorize.

I’ve always felt that expressing myself in other literary forms is natural and desirable. Or putting it most generally, that all novelists should live in two different worlds: a real one and an unreal one. That is perhaps why my taste in fiction is towards a fair degree of realism in style and my taste in nonfiction (say in what scientists and academics write) is towards those who can exhibit qualities like tolerance of hypothesis, dislike of the rigid interpretation, a general fluidity of attitude, and a basic sympathy towards a subject . . . a touch of ordinary humanity, in a phrase.

The styling almost looks as if the body panels have been shrink-wrapped over the components, which in effect they have been in the name of aerodynamic efficiency.

Mr. Dorsey repeated that Twitter should be consistent with its policies. But he said he had drawn a line in the sand that the president could not cross or Mr. Trump would lose his account privileges, people with knowledge of the event said.

some employees said Twitter was “complicit” by giving Mr. Trump a megaphone to “dog whistle” to his supporters, two attendees said. The employees implored executives to make changes before more people got hurt.

Twitter was also under pressure from its employees, who had for years agitated to remove Mr. Trump from the service, as well as lawmakers, tech investors and others. But while more than 300 employees signed a letter saying Mr. Trump’s account must be stopped, the decision to bar the president was made before the letter was delivered to executives, two of the people said.

Everyone on the task force understood the magnitude of the crisis; they attended meetings every weekday, with conference calls on weekends. North Korea and Iran didn’t receive such concentrated attention. Yet the Administration was simply not accomplishing tasks crucial to limiting the pandemic. There was a telling disparity between what Azar said in private, or in the task-force meetings, and what he told the President. He was hammering Redfield and the C.D.C. on testing delays while assuring Trump that the crisis was under control.

Pottinger was stunned: why not send them everywhere? He learned that the C.D.C. makes tests, but not at scale. For that, you have to go to a company like Roche or Abbott—molecular-testing powerhouses that have the experience and the capacity to manufacture millions of tests a month. The C.D.C., Pottinger realized, was “like a microbrewery—they’re not Anheuser-Busch.”

One night, Markel and Cetron were in Atlanta, talking over their study, and they ordered Thai food. When their dinner arrived, Markel opened his Styrofoam container: instead of a fluffy mound of noodles, he gazed on a level, gelatinous mass. “Look,” Markel said. “They’ve flattened the curve, just like we’re trying to do.” A slogan was born.

Markel compared each intervention to a slice of Swiss cheese; one layer by itself was too riddled with holes to be effective, but multiple layers made a profound difference. “Early, layered, and long” was the formula.

the century since 1918, technology has transformed so much, but the tools for curbing a novel pandemic haven’t changed. Masks, social distancing, and frequent hand washing remain the only reliable ways to limit contagion until treatments or vaccines emerge.

That whole idea that you were going to diagnose cases based on symptoms, isolate them, and contact-trace around them was not going to work,” Redfield told me recently. “You’re going to be missing fifty per cent of the cases. We didn’t appreciate that until late February.” The first mistake had been made, and the second was soon to happen.

Redfield made a formal request to the Chinese government and assembled two dozen specialists, but no invitation arrived. A few days later, in another conversation with Redfield, Gao started to cry and said, “I think we’re too late.”