One of the founding moments of public health in the 19th century effectively poisoned the water supply of London much more effectively than any modern day bioterrorist could have ever dreamed of doing.

Every childhood has its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to the outside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories when the grown child confronts them.

What I'm saying is individuals have better ideas if they're connected to rich, diverse networks of other individuals. If you put yourself in an environment with lots of different perspectives, you yourself are going to have better, sharper, more original ideas. It's not that the network is smart.

In a peer network, no one is officially in charge. It doesn't have a command hierarchy. It doesn't have a boss. So, all the decisions are somehow made collectively. The control of the system is in the hands of everyone who is a part of it.

The problem is, there are definitely some genuinely lame things on television, and there's more at the bottom of the barrel, because the barrel in a sense has gotten bigger.

Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine. They want to reinvent themselves by crossing conceptual borders. They want to complete each other as much as they want to compete

Popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards and dumbing-down, you have to do more intellectual work to make sense of today's television or games - much less the internet - than you did a few decades ago.