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 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...
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.
She was forty-five minutes late to work that day, but she had toast for breakfast. Goddamnit.
She had been beaten down by too many boys and men, too much hurt and poverty and fear. This was what Mala was destined to become, someone who ran from her attackers because she couldn’t afford to ange...
Seth was a portable, external id. Not always comfortable or appropriate, but handy nevertheless.
My nose itched. I tried to ignore it, but it got worse and worse, until it was all I could think of, the flaming lance of itch that strobed at the tip of my nostril. Furiously, I wrinkled my face, rat...
It’s the nature of the beast to believe in bubbles and think you can just entrepreneur your way out. She
It’s our version of Christian guilt—it’s impious to feel good about your piety. You have to want to be good, but not feel good about how good you are. The
It was funny how I could feel all alone and under surveillance at the same time.
It was considered insanely hard to poison a computer's BIOS remotely, but if I was going to rebuild a computer that had been fatally pwned, ignoring the BIOS would be like changing all your house lock...
In short: if I’m wrong, I promise that I’ll be wrong in a well-informed and interesting way.
In a city of twenty million like New York, there might be one or two terrorists. Maybe ten of them at the outside. 10/20,000,000 = 0.00005 percent. One twenty-thousandth of a percent. That’s pretty ra...
If you want, you can make him seem erratic and unreliable so they get rid of him. You can manufacture crises that might make one side or the other reveal the identities of other spies. In short, you o...
If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with: a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun? It’s game theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot...
If a paycheck could change your life, do you think they’d let you have one?