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 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...
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...
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.
Seth was a portable, external id. Not always comfortable or appropriate, but handy nevertheless.
Leon's life was all about discipline. He'd heard a weight-loss guru once explain that the key to maintaining a slim figure was to really listen to your body and only eat until it signaled that it was...
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 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...
It gave you ironic distance—a very now kind of high. Conspiracy
Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s crashware turd that no one under the age of forty used voluntarily.
In theory, we’re selfish assholes who want more than our neighbors, can’t be happy with a lot if someone else has a lot more.
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?
I'd never been a tall guy, and the girls I'd dated had all been my height--teenaged girls grow faster than guys, which is a cruel trick of nature.
I fireballed him as he was seeking out treasure after we wiped out a band of orcs, playing rock-paper-scissors with each orc to determine who would prevail in combat. This is a lot more exciting than...
He’d heard of it. It gave you ironic distance—a very now kind of high. Conspiracy people thought it was too zeitgeisty to be a coincidence, claimed it was spread to soften the population for its miser...
He hated it when adults told him he only felt the way he did because he was young. As if being young was like being insane or drunk, like the convictions he held were hallucinations caused by a mental...
From there, it was time for dinner: roaring fires, meat popping on spits, tofu sizzling on skillets ((it's northern California, a vegetarian option is not optional), and a style of eating and drinking...
