Impoverished resolution coerces slide-makers into using the compressed language of presentations—the bullet list of brief phrases. Bullets, little marks sometimes decorative or cute, signal the beginning of each phrase for those unable to recognize it.

For the naive, bullet lists may create the appearance of hard-headed organized thought. But in the reality of day-to-day practice, the PP cognitive style is faux-analytical.

A few individuals, after having long considered themselves experts speaking a scientific language, have finally awoken from their slumbers and suddenly realized that for the last few moments they have been walking on air, like Felix the Cat in the old cartoons, far from the scientific ground. Though legitimized by scientific knowledge, their discourse is seen to have been no more than the ordinary language of tactical games between economic powers and symbolic authorities.

On my first evening in post-communist Moscow, after the lavish dinner, I ambled through the busy midnight streets to the Hungry Duck. An enormous circular bar occupied what looked like a trading pit from the Chicago Commodity Exchange. But there was no futures trading—or much future—in the old USSR. God knows the room's Soviet-era purpose, but the current purpose was clear. A thousand twentysomethings—Americans, Russians, Germans, British, French, Australians, Japanese; the foot-soldier employees of the corporations that have invaded Moscow, the Anne Kleined and Brooks Brothered sentinels who man the mouse pads and keyboards of capitalism's front lines—were having a Thursday night screen saver. Happy youth was pressed breast to pec in one raving mass while fifty people danced on the bar top and giggling waitresses passed out free vodka shots from some booze company promoting a new brand. Ties were yanked off. Blouses were unbuttoned. Beer spills were whipped to foam by flapping loafer tassels. Arms waved in the air. Legs waved in the air. Whole bodies fluttered in the smoky space above the crowd. And on the sound system, through speakers so big they would have done Stalin proud and played at volume long enough to wake the old shit in his grave, Coolio sang “Gangsta's Paradise.”

But Russia is “a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, tied in a hankie, rolled in a blanket, and packed in a box full of little Styrofoam peanuts,” said Winston Churchill, or something like that.

In the marshes, acres of wild irishes bloomed, fated never to join a bouquet.

Even I realized that money was to politicians what the eucalyptus tree is to koala bears: food, water, shelter, and something to crap on.

Looking into a college textbook as an adult is a shock (and a vivid reminder of why we were so glad to get out of school). The prose style is at once puerile and impenetrable, Goodnight Moon rewritten by Henry James. The tone varies from condescension worthy of a presidential press conference to sly chumminess worthy of the current president. The professorial wit is duller than the professorial dicta, and these are dulled to unbearable numbness by the need to exhibit professorial self-importance. No idea, however simple—“When there's more of something, it costs less”—can be expressed without rendering it onto a madras sport coat of a graph and translating it into a rebus puzzle full of peculiar signs and notations. Otherwise the science of economics wouldn't seem as profound to outsiders as organic chemistry does.

In an arm-chair, with an elbow resting on the table and her head leaning on that hand, sat the strangest lady I have ever seen, or shall ever see.

She was dressed in rich materials —satins, and lace, and silks— all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. Some bright jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and some other jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid than the dress she wore, and half-packed trunks, were scattered about. She had not quite finished dressing, for she had but one shoe on —the other was on the table near her hand— her veil was but half arranged, her watch and chain were not put on, and some lace for her bosom lay with those trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves, and some flowers, and a prayer-book, all confusedly heaped about the looking-glass.

It was not in the first few moments that I saw all these things, though I saw more of them in the first moments than might be supposed. But, I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose, had shrunk to skin and bone. Once, I had been taken to see some ghastly waxwork at the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress, that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if I could.

You've seen it. There's the grin (not smile), the goatee he's worn since decades before everyone else did, the still-leonine head of hair that even at age 54 gives him the appearance of always plowing through the wind like a man on the prow of some very sweet ship. He's short, but people say you don't notice it because he never stands in one place long enough for the necessary comparisons. He's one of those fearless, twinkling guys you hear about who's always certain that the next thing — the very next — well, that will be something else, that'll be the best. Branson for better or worse is brio personified. Everything about him seems propelled. That figure he cuts is anything but irrelevant. The more you look, the more you realize it might be the most important of several important things about him.

…In the end it's not the deliriously ambitious branding ploy or even the deliriously ambitious appetite that attracts us to Branson and braces us, and offers us inspiration. It's something about the figure itself, the way it is not just sensible and straightforward but steadfastly alert and delighted and fun.

When is Branson working? When is he not? It all appears so seamless and so authentically pleasing. Unlike many of our most vaunted and imitated entrepreneurs, Branson forever strikes one as not compulsive or haunted or even, strangely enough, driven — though no one ever questions his drive. No, instead he just keeps looking like he's on the prow of that sweet boat, grinning because he knows a secret, happy because he doesn't know exactly what's next but is absolutely sure that it won't be dull and will quite possibly be a good deal better even than that.

[The King of Qin:]

First stage
Man and Sword become one with each other.
Here, even a blade of grass can be used as a lethal weapon.

In the next stage
the Sword resides not in the hand but in the heart.
Even without a weapon, the warrior can slay his enemies from a hundred paces.

But the ultimate ideal
is when the Sword disappears altogether.
The warrior embraces all around him
the desire to kill no longer exists
only grace remains.

A house is a machine for living in. Baths, sun, hot water, cold water, warmth at will, conservation of food, hygiene, beauty in the sense of good proportion. An armchair is a machine for sitting in and so on.

Participating in the most radical synchronous chatgroups must be like playing in an enormous, never-ending, crazy game, or attending a perpetual linguistic party, where you bring your language, not a bottle.

“That young girl,” [Marvin] added unexpectedly, “is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.”

The great ships hung motionless in the sky, over every nation on Earth. Motionless they hung, huge, heavy, steady in the sky, a blasphemy against nature. Many people went straight into shock as their minds tried to encompass what they were looking at. The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

“The Guide says that there is an art to flying,” said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”

Documents are, quite simply, talking things. They are bits of the material world—clay, stone, animal skin, plant fiber, sand—that we’ve imbued with the ability to speak.

Skill at chess [as opposed to that in other fields] can be measured, broken into components, subjected to laboratory experiments and readily observed in its natural environment, the tournament hall. It is for those reasons that chess has served as the greatest single test bed for theories of thinking—the “Drosophila of cognitive science,” as it has been called.

Premature cognitive commitments are like photographs in which meaning rather than motion is frozen. When a child hears about stiff, testy old people, the snapshot is processed as is. The child has little stake in the issue. Later, in old age, the grown-up child may not question the image. The original picture can become the foundation for everything learned about old age. Even when corrected, so much else has been built on this foundation that a new attitude is difficult to form.

Improvements can take place [in products] through natural evolution as long as each previous design is studied and the craftsperson is willing to be flexible. The bad features have to be identified. The folk artists change the bad features and keep the good ones unchanged. If a change makes matters worse, well, it just gets changed again on the next go-around. Eventually the bad features get modified into good ones, while the good ones are kept. The technical term for this process is “hill-climbing,” analogous to climbing a hill in the dark. Move your foot in one direction. If it is downhill, try another direction. If the direction is uphill, take one step. Keep doing this until you have reached a point where all steps would be downhill; then you are at the top of the hill—or at least at a local peak.