An object imbued with intent - it has power, it's treasure, we're drawn to it. An object devoid of intent - it's random, it's imitative, it repels us. It's like a piece of junk mail to be thrown away.
Individual investors have become far more powerful than anyone gives them credit for. Today, 85 million Americans invest in stocks. Collectively, that kind of buying and selling power can move markets.
The Chinese state is constructed in an entirely different way from western states. Unlike European states, for over a millennium the Chinese state has not been obliged to compete for power with rivals such as the church, the aristocracy or merchants.
While the West has enjoyed overwhelming global power, its moral preachings have been legitimised, and in effect enforced, by that power. But as that power begins to ebb, then the morality of its actions will be the subject of growing scrutiny and cha...
We have been through a period where we see power leaching away from Washington. Who is more important in the world today: Bill Clinton or Bill Gates? I don't know.
Marching thus at night, a battalion is doubly impressive. The silent monster is full of restrained power; resolute in its onward sweep, impervious to danger, it looks a menacing engine of destruction, steady to its goal, and certain of its mission.
In 2009, Hamas was relatively new to power. It had won elections just three years earlier and was flexing its newfound strength via a war with its old enemy, Israel, which it officially wants destroyed.
I think the Chinese model is one that appeals more and more in the developing world. People see that an authoritarian state can hold onto power, can hold on to stability and can drive the economy forward.
I think that the most beautiful thing lately hasn't been in hardware or software per se but collaboration - the idea behind Napster, which uses the distributed power of the Internet as its engine.
I know of no wars started by anyone to impose lack of religion on someone else. We have lethal Sunni v Shia, Catholic against Protestant, but no agnostic suicide bombers attack crowded atheist pubs.
I can usually find my own way out of whatever dicey literary or linguistic situations I wander into, but I have to work much harder at the science.
We have a society in which one of the greatest things you can do is a platform to see victim status, and one of the qualifications for that is that you have these exquisitely tender feelings about things and sensibilities which are easily offended.
Since my retirement, I've spent a lot of time trying to help the School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina. A society like this just can't afford an uneducated underclass of citizens.
What you're seeing with Occupy Wall Street and the others are people who are unhappy and they're directing their unhappiness now toward Wall Street and toward those they think are doing too well in our society.
We need to codify our values and build consensus around what we want from a free society and a free Internet. We need to put into law protections for our privacy and our right to speak and assemble.
We live in a society today where these children can be wanted children. Even if you don't want to keep this child after you've had it, there's plenty of young couples out there, that want children.
We have a real role in how our own collective lives, our nation, and our world and society turn out. Seizing those opportunities is important, and disasters are sometimes one of those opportunities.
The hometown economic elite - rich local families or individuals whom people used to praise or revile, read about in the society pages, and gossip about incessantly - disappeared from most American cities decades ago.
As music migrates into our iPods, CD collections require less and less room, residing in our heads rather than resounding off the walls. The protracted labor of amassing a personal music library has lost its detective zeal.
The majority of them give the impression of being men who have been drafted into the job during a period of martial law and are only waiting for the end of the emergency to get back to a really congenial occupation such as slum demolition or debt col...
Once, when a British Prime Minister sneezed, men half a world away would blow their noses. Now when a British Prime Minister sneezes nobody else will even say 'Bless You'.
