"Trust is the key to breaking [this cycle]. And I think Talese’s method shows us how we might gain it: by checking with our subjects and making sure we understand what they’re trying to express, beyond what they actually say. Because if our subjects are interesting enough to report on, they’re deserving of respect. And if we respect them, they will respect us. That’s a much more virtuous circle." I think Alex is right, you know.

"'...consciousness enables us to make conjectures in which someone called “I” can be seen in a hypothetical situation or a story; and from that flows the ability to make judgements, plans, decisions. In short, consciousness takes the vastness of the physical world, whose coordinates of time and space we cannot really grasp, and gives us a model, a working version - a simplified, toy version if you prefer - in which we can more usefully and successfully operate.’" Seeing the "I" in the world, as a way of making things understandable.

"In 1872, the British government and the Royal Society launched the first major oceanic expedition, transforming a two-hundred-and-twenty-six-foot naval warship into a floating laboratory...the ship, with five scientists, roamed the globe for thee and a half years. The crew was constantly dredging the ocean floor for specimens, and the work was repetitive, and brutal; two men went insane, two others drowned, and another committed suicide." I am looking forward to Bill Harris telling me more about this.

"Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to." The rest of the quotation is where the magic happens.

"It was at that moment that I understood, more fully than ever before, why revolutionaries succeed and then fail. It's because they're switching genres. They take over the country in a third-person (or first person) action game, but then they have to play an RTS to govern the country."

"Sony acts like a character in a Charlotte Brontë novel--they seem to think they have an entire lifetime to seize the moment."

"YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE... I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle." All of Milton Glaser's points are worth thinking on, but this one feels particularly acute.

Touché.

"Watching classics like The Apartment and Manhattan made me wonder at the romances we’d write about some cities, and Slumdog Millionaire bizarrely seemed like a continuation of that: a romance of the maximum-city." Yes; my favourite thing in that film was the growth of the city around Jamal, Bombay becoming Mumbai, and the skyscrapers growing.

"With Half-Life and Counter-Strike, and more recently Team Fortress 2, we've learned that we're no longer making stand-alone games but creating entertainment services. With Left 4 Dead we're extending that tradition by creating additional gameplay and releasing our internal tools to aspiring developers so they may also create and distribute new Left 4 Dead experiences." Lots of places have the news; this quotation is the killer, though. "Entertainment services". GAAS, anyone?

"We should be an embodied person in the world rather than a disembodied finger tickling a screen walking down the street. We need to unfold and unpack the screen into the world." Wonderfully put. I love Jones.

"Every time Bobby Kotick opens his mouth, I see a giant cow with "GUITAR HERO" branded on its side, and Bobby Kotick is squeezing two teats as fast as he can."

"Because stupidity is such an unthinkably terrible thing in our culture, the students will then spend hours constructing arguments that explain why they are intelligent yet are having difficulties. The moment you start down this path, you have lost your focus."

"I am stumped by how to excerpt the language on message boards and blogs... My problem with message-board language brings up a prior problem in journalism: the difficulty of translating spoken language into written language."

"Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests." Iain Tait with some DFW. Sharp stuff.

"...I think the trick of Portal is that the AI NPC is really the player. The NPC addresses the PC in the same patronizing tone I address characters I control when they... slide off the platform I tried to land them on."

"It seems to me that Coverflow replicates everything that is frustrating and unpleasant about looking for something in the real world."