There's something really liberating about having some corner of your life that's yours, that no one gets to see except you. It's a little like nudity or taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once i...
There was a whole subculture of mentalists who spent their nights breaking into boarded-up tube stations, forgotten sewers, abandoned buildings, and other places you just aren’t meant to be.
There was a time when my favorite thing in the world was putting on a cape and hanging out in hotels, pretending to be an invisible vampire whom everyone stared at.
There are lots of ways to be superhuman. You can trick others into thinking that unless they do what you tell them, they won’t eat. You can cajole people into doing what you want by making them fear g...
The you that is you is actually the space of things that you might think in response to some stimulus.
The proprietary advantage once enjoyed by companies who assembled teams under their own roofs and used them only on their own products has been surrendered in the rush to attain some semblance of lean...
The merc was more than a person: like a spaceship launch, her existence implied thousands of skilled people, generations of experts, wars, treaties, scholarship, and supply-chain management. Every one...
The law didn’t care if you were actually doing anything bad; they were willing to put you under the microscope just for being statistically abnormal.
The important thing about security systems isn’t how they work, it’s how they fail.
The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.
The fact is, almost everything you do is collaborative. Somewhere out there, someone else had a hand it it.
The best way to be superhuman is to do things that you love with other people who love them, too. The only way to do that is to admit you’re doing it because you love it and if you do more than everyo...
The Nazi cipher was called Enigma, and they used a little mechanical computer called an Enigma Machine to scramble and unscramble the messages they got.
That’s the walkaway dilemma. If you take without giving, you’re a mooch. If you keep track of everyone else’s taking and giving, you’re a creep scorekeeper. It’s our version of Christian guilt—it’s im...
Ten thousand years ago, the state-of-the-art was a goat.
Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.
Start at the beginning, he said. Move one step in the direction of your goal. Remember that you can change direction to maneuver around obstacles. You don’t need a plan, you need a vector.
Somewhere, in a distant land he barely knew the name of, people had stopped buying washing machines, and so his city had died.
Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totally different.
She was forty-five minutes late to work that day, but she had toast for breakfast. Goddamnit.