This is exactly the right thing to do.

Quoted: Greg Mortenson has spent less than one-ten-thousandth as much as the Bush administration to help fight terrorism in Pakistan. Instead of blowing things up, he builds schools.

Higher life expectancy leads to new moral and practical problems.

Quoted: she showed graphs describing the three most common ways that old people die and the trajectory and duration of each scenario

Quoted: “We’re doing this so badly because we’ve never been here before,” Dr. Lynn said. “But the care system we’ve got didn’t come down from the mountain. We made it up, and we can make it up better.”

Pyrotechnician human interest story.

Quoted: Then there are those who prefer to celebrate their country by blowing up a small part of it.

I wonder if this essay isn't a decade late. Seems obvious, no?

Quoted: Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers

How industrialists created the consumer culture to keep people occupied. Baa.

It's encouraging to know that there's plenty of room for improvement. Our world is a product of dirty historical conditions, from apes through tyrants to masterminds. We can clean them up to make a better world possible.

Quoted: The urge to buy is as manufactured as the stuff you have heaped in your shopping basket.

Schools are evil, here's why.

Quoted: Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are

An interesting perspective on recent history: industrialization created free time (unused mental capacity or "cognitive surplus"), TV filled it at first but now we are finding more constructive ways to apply it.

Quoted: I started telling [a TV producer] about the Wikipedia article on Pluto...She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

Was looking for CSS metalanguage, stumbled on this.

Quoted: The closest you'll get to the Old West short of a time machine!

Quoted: Computers, in Wozniak's scheme, will increase our intellectual capacity and enhance our rational self-control. Wozniak is a kind of algorithmic man. He's exploring what it's like to live in strict obedience to reason. On first encounter, he appears to be one of the happiest people I've ever met.