"So perhaps we should just insist that death is bad for me when I'm dead. But that, of course, returns us to the earlier puzzle. How could death be bad for me when I don't exist? Isn't it true that something can be bad for you only if you exist? Call this idea the existence requirement."

"Many young producers are ditching the minimalistic beats and hollow, gray dub textures that dominated dance trends for much of the last decade in favor of something bigger, brighter, louder, greater, and all around more, more, more. For these maximalist-minded artists, traditional melodic structures are never enough: Why not have six synths playing three melodies out of step with each other, and throw a cluster of guitar and drum solos in there, too? It's a trend that parallels rapid advancements for both digital production and consumption. It's also the perfect soundtrack for a current generation who live (and, sometimes, dance) on the internet."

"Kanye's interest in this new maximal wave of electronic music makes a lot of sense-- why wouldn't the guy who loves The Biggest Things want to work with young guns that are just as sonically greedy?"

"Religious fundamentalist groups, with the colonial powers, American and European colonial powers, are two faces of the same coin. So if the Muslim Brotherhood now or the religious groups and all that are speaking about the veil and virginity, it is because they do not want to speak about economic problems, and capitalism and colonialism."

"Das CHE ist ungefähr so gemeinnützig wie die Pharmalobby, der ja auch nur unsere Gesundheit am Herzen liegt. Langfristig ist der Bildungsmarkt für große "content provider" wie Bertelsmann eine Lizenz zum Gelddrucken. Verpunktung und Modularisierung schaffen längerfristig vermarktbare Wissens- und Bildungseinheiten. Je prekärer die Verhältnisse am neuakademischen Arbeitsmarkt werden, desto größer wird die Bereitschaft der Mittelschicht, für die Bildungsabschlüsse ihrer Kinder viel Geld zu investieren. Das wird das größte Privatgeschäft seit der Riesterrente. Außerdem hat das Haus Bertelsmann auch eine ideologische Sendung: die Durchdringung aller öffentlichen Bereiche mit dem Geist von Markt, Wettbewerb, Konkurrenz."

"The Arab Spring has shown the limits of American power in the Middle East.  No longer does the US have the prestige and resources to dominate Middle East affairs to the degree it has since the British withdrew from east of Suez in 1971. Neither the US nor Europe has the great financial resources needed to shape prospects in the Arab Spring countries other than marginally; significant investment will also have to come from elsewhere, particularly the Gulf states and China - countries that do not share to the same extent the Western interest in reinforcement of democratic values."

"The long-term prospect includes also the possibility for a freer Middle East. Over a hundred million Arabs (a third of the Arab world) are freer today because they have escaped from long entrenched dictatorial regimes in the past 10 months."

"'The best day after a bad emperor is the first,' the Roman historian Tacitus once memorably observed. This third Arab awakening is in the scales of history. It has in it both peril and promise, the possibility of prison but also the possibility of freedom."

"Bavarian food is the guy at the gym in the tiny muscle tee who’s lifting weights so heavy, the veins in his neck and head (and other parts of the body that you didn’t even know HAD veins) start to pop out."

"Don’t ignore the dumpling. It will help you to soak up the delicious pork juice that has filled the bottom of your plate. It is nectar of the gods. Drink it, and you will LIVE FOREVER. Probably."

"Germans can schnitzel the hell out of anything. First, they take a slab of meat and hammer it flat. That’s right: they are so damn badass, they beat their food after it’s dead."

"That’s it. My favorite Bavarian (/German) foods. If you eat them, you will grow hair on your chest and you will never need to call a tow truck because if your car breaks down you will be able to PUSH IT HOME. Gender equality being what it is, I’d say that’s a pretty desirable outcome for any man or woman."

"There are organizations and websites everywhere that are taking over newspapers’ role as tastemaker and watchdog and forum. These disruptors don’t replace investigative reporting, but they replace the other 95% of what made professional news organizations important."

"You’re not competing on the basis of whether you have unique news. You’re competing with the entire world on the basis of the value that consumers get out of your product.”

"Educated people over forty have come to assume that journalism, whether on television, radio, print or the web, is the most convenient way to get answers to questions like what’s on the television, what’s going on in my neighborhood, who got elected, who is making a mess of things, any new music I should hear? Ask any of those questions to the baby boomer middle class, as the Knight Foundation did, and they’ll hand you a newspaper. [..] The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against."

"The most important reason the news industry is in a pickle is because people aren’t getting much value out of our writing, documentaries and newscasts. We only occassionally sit down to really enjoy and savour journalism. More often we use it to procrastinate at work – which the populist in me frankly believes is a much better explanation for the fact that we consume so much crime, celebrity and weird news, viz. because we’re just looking for a distraction, not, as the most commonly proffered explanation would have it, because each and every one of us is retarded."

"Früher gab es beim Kindergeburtstag für jeden Gast noch ein Tütchen zum Mitnehmen, heut kann man sich wenigstens noch ein Tütchen Erlebnisse zum Wiederkäuen am nächsten Tag einpacken. Der ganze Abend wird dazu einmal durch die Verkläranlage gejagt und am Ende erzählt man sich gegenseitig die buntesten Abenteuer, die mit dem drögen Realgeschehen natürlich nichts mehr zu tun haben."

"Besser weil turbulenter tönt es, wenn der Nacherzähler in einer halbstündigen Hysterie aufzählt, dass eigentlich alle Beteiligten zu irgendeinem Zeitpunkt mindestens einmal „irgendwie weg“ waren."

"This is the play-date generation. ... There was a time when children came home from school and just played randomly with their friends. Or hung around and got bored, and eventually that would lead you on to something. Kids don't get to do that now. Busy parents book them into things constantly—violin lessons, ballet lessons, swimming teams. The kids get the idea that someone will always be structuring their time for them."

"Starting at an earlier age, students feel that their free time should be taken up with purposeful activities. There is less stumbling on things you love ... and more being steered toward pursuits."

"The "helicopter parents" who hover over nearly every choice or action of their offspring have given way to "snowplow parents" who determinedly clear a path for their child and shove aside any obstacle they perceive in the way."

"Precisely because the 18th-century orphan-hero is usually untried, unprotected, disadvantaged (not to mention misinformed or uninformed about his or her parentage), he or she can function as a sort of textual free radical: as plot-catalyst and story-generator—a mixer-upper of things, whose search for a legitimate identity or place in the world of the fiction at once jump-starts the narrative and tends to shunt it away from didacticism and any predictable or programmatic unfolding of events."

"Pious college officials yammer on about the need for students to develop something they (the officials) call "critical thinking" and thereby gain intellectual autonomy: a foothold on adulthood. But I'm wondering if it isn't time to reaffirm an idea that "critical thinking" begins at home, or better, with home—which is to say, that each of us at some point needs to think (dispassionately, daringly) about the "homes" from which we emerge and what we really think of them."

about the englightenment: "The central insight of the period? It's so familiar to us, perhaps, that we have lost sight of its momentousness: that individual human beings are endowed with critical faculties and powers of moral discernment, and as a result, have a right, if not the obligation, to challenge oppressive, unjust, and degrading patterns of authority. Over the course of the 18th century and into the 19th, more and more educated men (and a few brave women) felt intellectually empowered enough to criticize previously sacrosanct "received ideas": traditional religious beliefs, established forms of government, accepted modes of social, legal, and economic organization, the conventional dynamics of family life, relations between men and women, adults and children—all those cognitive grids through which we customarily make sense of the world. [..] At its most potent, the critique was severe—world-changing. A host of Enlightenment freethinkers—Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, Adam Smith—articulated it in passionate and various ways: that the venerable cognitive models human beings had mobilized over the centuries to explain "the nature of things" were often nothing more than self-reinforcing and barbaric "superstition." Taken for dogma, these man-made belief systems had produced a host of ills: savage religious and political strife, the commercial exploitation of the many by the few, the enslavement and genocidal killing of masses of people, the degradation of women, children, animals, and the natural world—century upon century, in fact, of unfathomable global suffering."

"Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men, even when nature has long emancipated them from alien guidance, nevertheless gladly remain immature for life. For the same reasons, it is all too easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so convenient to be immature! If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me."

"The intimate authority of parents is, after all, the first kind of authority most of us experience; the parental command the first utterance we recognize as that which must be obeyed. Pain and suffering, we soon learn, will result from our disobedience."

"For better or worse, the ferocious, liberating notion embedded in the early novel is that parents are there to be fooled and defied (especially in matters of love, sex, and erotic fulfillment); that even the most venerated traditions exist to be broken with; that creative power is rightly vested in the individual rather than groups, in the young rather than the old; that thought is free. The assertion of individual rights ineluctably begins, symbolically and every other way, with the primal rebellion of the child against parent."

"My own view remains predictably twisty, fraught, and disloyal. Parents, in my opinion, have to be finessed, thought around, even as we love them: They are so colossally wrong about so many important things. And even when they are not, paradoxically, even when they are 100 percent right, the imperative remains the same: To live an "adult" life, a meaningful life, it is necessary, I would argue, to engage in a kind of symbolic self-orphaning."

"This is how the virtuous working class appears in the liberal imagination: hard-working, responsible, defined, and redeemed by work, but failed by an economy that cannot create the necessary wage labor into which this responsibility can be invested."

"Thus we arrive at a third iteration of the work ethic in the post-industrial era, where work is now represented neither as a path to salvation nor as a road to riches, but as a source of personal identity and fulfillment. This ethic is exemplified by hip Silicon Valley firms like Apple, which reportedly told employees, in response to their wage demands, that “Money shouldn’t be an issue when you’re employed at Apple. Working at Apple should be viewed as an experience.”

"Basic income is offered as a successor to “wages for housework”, a signature demand of the Marxist feminists who emerged from the Italian workerist scene. The objective, says Weeks, is to highlight “the arbitrariness with which contributions to social production are and are not rewarded with wages,” thus making visible the enormous amount of unwaged reproductive labor performed by women."

"The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends."

"Modern human beings are not much like mimosas. It’s true that both have biological clocks, but only one of us has culture. And culture, delightful as it is, turns out to radically complicate—“fuck up” would not be an overstatement—our relationship to time."

"Among species, we humans are to time what Polish villagers have long been to place: unhappy subjects of multiple competing regimes."

„Die Stärke eines Volkes misst sich am Wohl der Schwachen. [..] Das Wort ‚Schwache‘ ist dabei freilich schon infiziert von den Ausschließlichkeitskriterien der Leistungsgesellschaft. Ein starker Staat ist ein Staat, der sich um das Wohl der Schwachen kümmert – und dabei vielleicht auch lernt, dass die Schwachen gar nicht so schwach sind, wie man oft meint; und dann ihre Stärken, die Stärken des Imperfekten, zu schätzen lernt.“

„Die Schirme, die in Europa zur Rettung von Banken, Wirtschaft und Euro aufgespannt werden, sind Milliarden groß, aber die Größe allein bringt es nicht. Jeder weiß, was ein guter Schirm braucht, der bei schwerem Wetter funktionieren soll: Er braucht einen festen Stock, an dem man ihn gut halten kann, und er braucht Speichen, die ihm Stabilität geben; je mehr solcher Streben er hat, umso wetterfester ist er.“

„Europäisches Sozialmodell [..] ist die gemeinsame Vorstellung davon, dass soziale Ungleichheit nicht gottgegeben ist.“

„Die Natur ist ein Gerechtigkeitsrisiko. [..] Die besseren Gene hat sich niemand erarbeitet, die bessere Familie auch nicht. Das Schicksal hat sie ihm zugeteilt. Es teilt ungerecht aus und es gleicht die Ungerechtigkeiten nicht immer aus. Nicht derjenige, der das ändern, der das ausgleichen will, so gut es geht, ist dekadent – sondern derjenige, der es dabei belassen will.“

"For his time, the Prophet Mohammed was a revolutionary feminist. Before him, Arab women had no rights; they were men's property. Before Islam, men could have as many wives as they wanted. While it might sound outrageous to Americans today, the Quran insisted that men could have no more than four wives and that the wives must be treated equally -- a radical idea at the time."

"How much does Saudi Arabia hate women? So much so that 15 girls died in a school fire in Mecca in 2002, after "morality police" barred them from fleeing the burning building -- and kept firefighters from rescuing them -- because the girls were not wearing headscarves and cloaks required in public."

„Ich verabscheue das Rückständige der Freigeisterei, dieses altmodische Überbleibsel bürgerlicher Aufklärung. Mir ist der infantile Partisanenstolz zuwider, der immer meint, gegen Herrschaft und Autorität den Helden spielen zu müssen. Der Widerständler ist sich zu fein, zu dumm oder zu faul, um jene Macht zu erobern, die er zum Wirken brauchte. Deshalb erklärt er die ganze Welt zur sauren Traube, stellt sich daneben und beginnt sein Protestgeschrei. Sie können es an unzähligen Beispielen beobachten: Gibt man dem Freiheitskämpfer Macht und Ansehen innerhalb der verhassten Maschinerie, wird er sogleich still und werkelt fortan in aller Treuherzigkeit vor sich hin. Was lehrt uns das über die Menschen, […]? Sie tauschen gern ein X gegen ein U, wenn es nur dazu dient, ihre Eigenliebe zu befriedigen.“

“I have no point of view as for example now; I could not possibly have a point of view, im just moving around and picking up information from any direction. A point of view means a static fix position and you can’t have a static fix position in the electric age. It is impossible to have a point of view in the electric age, and have any meaning at all. You’ve got to be everywhere at once, whether you like it or not, you have to be participating in everything going on at the same time, and that is not a point of view.”

"In today’s era of exquisite confusion — political, economic and otherwise — the neurotic would be a welcome guest, nervous company for nervous days, always ready to provide doses of that most potent vaccine against gloominess: wisecracking, urbane gloominess."

“Put it this way,” Dr. Milrod said. “These are ridiculous times, and if it all makes sense to you, there’s probably something wrong.”

"There are three statements that somehow manage to coexist in the mind of an uneducated Arab. The first statement is, 'The Holocaust never happened.' The second statement is, 'Hitler was good for killing the Jews, even though the Holocaust has never happened.' The third statement is, 'Whoever is running Israel is as bad as Hitler, who was good for killing the Jews, even though the Holocaust never happened.'"

"Kein Stil wollte mehr passen zur rasant fortschreitenden Technik, die Dampfmaschinen erfand und Bahnhöfe groß wie Kathedralen. Also klebten Architekten alle bekannten Stile auf die Fassaden, während sich im Inneren das Neue entfaltete. Inzwischen geht Retro über den bloßen Rückgriff auf die Designgeschichte hinaus. Retro lässt uns das Morgen umarmen, weil wir das Gestern sicher in der Hand zu halten glauben. Retro ist ein permanenter Begleiter. Er muss es sein."

"Morgenbesser replied, "Who do you think you are, Kant?" The word "Kant" was mistaken for a vulgar epithet and Morgenbesser had to explain the situation at the police station."

"Germans need frequent reassurance that they are O.K. The rest of the world likes frequent reassurance that the Germans are O.K. Mr. Gauck is in a position to give both."

"For thousands of years, she said, anyone who wanted access to knowledge had to first find a teacher or an expert. After the printing press was invented, libraries and universities became repositories of knowledge. But now with the Internet, “universities do not hold the monopoly on information anymore,” Ms. Mulder said. As a result, she said, the five functions now performed by universities — teaching; providing a space for social interaction; testing students’ knowledge and offering feedback in the form of grades; cultivating a reputation as a good place to learn; and certifying what graduates know through accreditation — will inevitably change. The goal of Open Education Week was “to make the process seem less scary, she said, adding, “We want to show how you as a student or an institution or a government can benefit from these changes.”

"Every time an American newspaper calls Israel a democracy, we should urge it to include the caveat: only within the green line."

"For their part, American Jewish organizations might argue that it is unfair to punish Israeli settlements when there are worse human rights offenses in the world and when Palestinians still commit gruesome terrorist acts. But settlements need not constitute the world’s worst human rights abuse in order to be worth boycotting."

"The Samwers are revered for putting Berlin’s startup scene on the map and despised for sticking Germany with a reputation as the copycat capital of Europe."

„Was kann man nun von einem Menschen […] erwarten? Überschütten Sie ihn mit allen Erdengütern, versenken Sie ihn in Glück bis über die Ohren, bis über den Kopf, so daß an die Oberfläche des Glücks wie zum Wasserspiegel nur noch Bläschen aufsteigen, geben Sie ihm ein pekuniäres Auskommen, daß ihm nichts anderes zu tun übrigbleibt, als zu schlafen, Lebkuchen zu vertilgen und für den Fortbestand der Menschheit zu sorgen — so wird er doch, dieser selbe Mensch, Ihnen auf der Stelle aus purer Undankbarkeit, einzig aus Schmähsucht einen Streich spielen. Er wird sogar die Lebkuchen aufs Spiel setzen und sich vielleicht den verderblichsten Unsinn wünschen, den allerunökonomischsten Blödsinn, einzig um in diese ganze positive Vernünftigkeit sein eigenes unheilbringendes phantastisches Element beizumischen. Gerade seine phantastischen Einfälle, seine banale Dummheit wird er behalten wollen …“

"But what Greek experience actually shows is that while running deficits in good times can get you in trouble — which is indeed the story for Greece, although not for Spain — trying to eliminate deficits once you’re already in trouble is a recipe for depression."

"Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. Which is not surprising: work wasn't fun for most of them. Why did we have to memorize state capitals instead of playing dodgeball? For the same reason they had to watch over a bunch of kids instead of lying on a beach. You couldn't just do what you wanted."

"Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember that precisely because it seemed so anomalous. It was like being told to use dry water. Whatever I thought he meant, I didn't think he meant work could literally be fun—fun like playing. It took me years to grasp that."

"Just as houses all over America are full of chairs that are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed 250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who've done great things."

"By the time they reach an age to think about what they'd like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one's work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can't blame kids for thinking "I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world."

"How much are you supposed to like what you do? Unless you know that, you don't know when to stop searching. And if, like most people, you underestimate it, you'll tend to stop searching too early. You'll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the desire to make money, or prestige—or sheer inertia."

"As a lower bound, you have to like your work more than any unproductive pleasure. You have to like what you do enough that the concept of "spare time" seems mistaken. Which is not to say you have to spend all your time working. You can only work so much before you get tired and start to screw up. Then you want to do something else—even something mindless. But you don't regard this time as the prize and the time you spend working as the pain you endure to earn it."

"The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?"

"The advice of parents will tend to err on the side of money. It seems safe to say there are more undergrads who want to be novelists and whose parents want them to be doctors than who want to be doctors and whose parents want them to be novelists. The kids think their parents are "materialistic." Not necessarily. All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won't get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you'll have to deal with the consequences."

"Most people would say, I'd take that problem. Give me a million dollars and I'll figure out what to do. But it's harder than it looks. Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Much as everyone thinks they want financial security, the happiest people are not those who have it, but those who like what they do. So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do with it may not be as good as it seems."

"While deliberate practice remains absolutely crucial, it’s important to remember that the most important skills we develop at an early age are not domain specific. [..] Instead, the real importance of early childhood has to do with the development of general cognitive and non-cognitive traits, such as self-control, patience, grit, and the willingness to practice."