Latest Quotes

“The way to win a game like that involves maintaining and increasing the tension. The person who makes the first break, who releases the tension, it's going to go against them, partly because they've broken the tension and now the other guy has the first move to exploit the new play dynamic.”

— Josh Waitzkin, The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Game

“If I have a slightly better position, and I'm improving my position, then all the tactics are hovering like potential energy.”

— Josh Waitzkin, The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Game

“War is a continuation of policy by other means.”

— Carl von Clausewitz, On War

“Greg has an interesting way, unique to New Mexico, of recharging his batteries. He grew up with a strong sense of local history, and one of his favorite hobbies is 'ghost towning,' where you get maps and track down old ghost towns in the New Mexican wilderness. 'It's incredible, these abandoned town…”

— Sam Sheridan, The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Game

“[Amazing athletes] are at peace with failure or success; as [Peter] Schjeldahl wrote, they take 'an impersonal joy' in what they do. They see themselves from the outside, as impersonal constructs, which may lead to the oft-ridiculed referencing themselves in the third person.”

— Sam Sheridan, The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Game

“'Only an animal does useful things,' he said at last, after a long silence. 'An animal gets food, finds a place to sleep, tries to keep comfortable. But I wanted to do something that was not useful, not like an animal at all. Something only a human being would do.'”

— Gerard d'Aboville , The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Game

“We choose things that are against our own best interests because the freedom to make that choice is more important than those interests.”

— Sam Sheridan, The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Game

“...when things happened without any discernable context; when there were no recognizable patterns; when it was all incoherent; when isolated, disjointed events would take place only to be engulfed by an opaque black void, their relative meaning, their significance, annulled by the eons of entropic s…”

— Mark Leyner, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel

“Everyone typically thinks that when you're intimately close to someone, like your husband or your wife or your mom or your dad, that it opens you up so much to all these powerful feelings of connectedness and enables you to understand the other person with such incredible empathy. But I really think…”

— Mark Leyner, REAL HUSBAND, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel

“What if we created a 'thing,' which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?”

— Mark Leyner, REAL WIFE, The Sugar Frosted Nutsack: A Novel

“...the likely future for North America is that of a coherent economic unit where the United States, Canada, and Mexico band together to make major investments in customized robot production and then use these investments to dominate global manufacturing.”

— Tyler Cowen, Average is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

“Outmatched by coolly masterful opponents, suddenly aware of the appalling abyss that separated the expectations of their people and their own ability to deliver, Brazil gave in to blind panic.”

— Ken Early, Why Brazil Lost

“'It was important to counter their passion and emotions with calmness, patience, and persistence, also with courage and belief in our own strength,' German manager Joachim Löw said. 'You realized after the 2–0 that they were confused, that they never recovered their original organization. We were ex…”

— Joachim Löw, Why Brazil Lost

“'From minute one we had the impression something big was possible,' Kroos said. 'We realized that the Brazilians were a bit upset, they were not so clear in their actions. We took advantage of the possibilities and scored one goal after another.'”

— Toni Kroos, Why Brazil Lost

“Let me explain something to you, then you can continue your question. When were the goals scored? 23, 24, 25, 26, 28 minutes? In such a space of time, nobody is going to change anything. It was one after the other. I think everyone blanked out. We were trying to talk to them, to get organized, to st…”

— Luiz Felipe Scolari, Why Brazil Lost

“It was as though Germany had gathered 60,000 4-year-olds together and briskly announced that there is no such thing as Santa Claus.”

— Ken Early, Why Brazil Lost

“So the only thing we can do is to continue to demand that these services provide what we think we need, the 'we' being both individual and collective, and keep paying attention to the way they have structural problems in doing so. Whether that's algorithm or editorial acumen or yellow journalism, th…”

— Tarleton Gillespie, Q&A: Tarleton Gillespie says algorithms may be new, but editorial calculations aren’t

“The funny thing about clickbait as an idea is it's basically shorthand for: People really wanted to read this. Writing a really juicy headline to get people to read it, whether you got the substance or not, is not new to BuzzFeed and Upworthy. Is that gaming the algorithm? Was the algorithm of the p…”

— Tarleton Gillespie, Q&A: Tarleton Gillespie says algorithms may be new, but editorial calculations aren’t

“One of the things I found really interesting about Twitter Trends is that they'll weight tweets or hashtags that appear across different clusters of people that aren't connected to each other on Twitter higher than a lot of activity that happens in a densely connected cluster of people. You can imag…”

— Tarleton Gillespie, Q&A: Tarleton Gillespie says algorithms may be new, but editorial calculations aren’t

“It's in some ways a very old problem. NBC has to decide what's acceptable at 8 p.m. And they do that within some guidance of what the FCC says, but mostly they're working within those barriers, and deciding what they think their audience will accept, what they think their moral compass is, what thei…”

— Tarleton Gillespie, Q&A: Tarleton Gillespie says algorithms may be new, but editorial calculations aren’t