A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.

What is extraordinary is that in the United States the current culture desires feelings of machismo and power, but at the same time has absolutely no taste whatsoever for even the slightest loss or bloodshed or ickiness. That's a fascinating combination.

People try to treat technology as an object, and it can't be. It can only be a channel.

There's no question that males are more violent and more prone to the type of hierarchical organizations that lead to war. War is largely a male activity. In fact, there is some correlation [between making war and] having an excess of males in the population.

One good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult.

An intelligent person feels guilty for downloading music without paying the musician, but they use this free-open-culture ideology to cover it.

Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.