"1. Each age has its presiding metaphor. Ours is aerial bombing.

2. Drone warfare and the IMF are variations on a theme: decisions taken from a great height, with disregard for consequences on the ground.

3. Downton Abbey’s popularity is about a nostalgia for class superiority, and the desire to watch those who act from a great height.

4. Virgin Atlantic’s obnoxious designation of First Class as “Upper Class” is about the same idea: that class is benign and charming.

5. One question links the IMF, drones, Virgin’s “Upper Class,” Limbaugh’s violence and Strauss-Kahn’s, and the mania for “Downton Abbey.”

6. The question is this: those people down there, are they really people? It’s a question about for whose sake this world exists.

7. Someone in soft, casual clothes in a featureless building in Nevada presses a button, and the question disappears."

"So rather than focusing on emulating particular techniques and methods, we should be doing everything we can to embrace, inspire, and use our own empathy in order to better understand and relate to our students. It is only from this space that we can effectively generate and use the appropriate techniques and methods for any particular task. In this way, there is no “recipe,” “secret sauce,” or “silver bullet” for teaching effectively that can be used by anybody, anytime, anywhere. Instead, I’m proposing a “generative” method, one in which we “generate” the appropriate method that takes into consideration the broadest range of factors that we can manage to accommodate."

"Connectivity now so cheap, pervasive, democratic, common...will be small movement among individualists, trend-setters, early adopters to disconnect...renowned personage...rejects cell phones, email, and is available ONLY face to face."

"Darknets, private channels, unlisted numbers, and dark pools of liquidity are all technologies of disconnection. Someday some of the most important information on earth will be information that is NOT connected to the global internet."