A conference talk on the history and interpretation of the Second Amendment.

How the Second Amendment Works - YouTube

EFF:

Out of a total of over 11,000 sneak and peek requests, only 51 were used for terrorism.

Andrew Leonard:

Do we want our health insurers and employers to get their hands on real-time data that could conceivably be tracking our alcohol consumption or sexual experiences or mental health? Who will own this data, ultimately -- the manufacturers of the devices that collect it, the insurers and employers who act upon it, or us, the creators? Where does the data live?

The "full-disclosure future" is upon us. What happens to privacy when "wellness" becomes a condition of your employment?

Juli Clover:

Verizon is altering the web traffic of its customers by inserting a Unique Identifier Header or UIDH, a temporary serial number that lets advertisers identify Verizon users on the web. According to Jacob Hoffman-Andrews of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the UIDH serves as a "perma-cookie" that can be read by any web server to "build a profile" of internet habits.

Evgeny Morozov:

If so much of our everyday behaviour is already captured, analysed and nudged, why stick with unempirical approaches to regulation? Why rely on laws when one has sensors and feedback mechanisms?

Ali Winston and Darwin Bond Graham:

In Atlanta, the police foundation has bankrolled the surveillance cameras that now blanket the city, as well as the center where police officers monitor live video feeds. Police boosters say there's no need for public debate over these types of acquisitions.

Adam Gopnik:

The best argument for reading history is not that it will show us the right thing to do in one case or the other, but rather that it will show us why even doing the right thing rarely works out.

Lawrence D. Freedman:

In the end, the lesson of 1914 is that there are no sure lessons. Yet there are always choices, and the best advice for governments to emerge from the story of 1914 is to make them carefully: be clear about core interests, get the best possible information, explore opportunities for a peaceful settlement, and treat military plans with skepticism.

Rory Stewart:

Nothing is ultimately more damaging to the military than absence of criticism.

Paul Ford:

I live pretty far back from the cliffs of folly in a hut of irony and suspicion.

John McPhee:

I work in a fake medieval turret on the roof of a campus building. When I come out and walk around, bumping into friends, they tend to ask me, "What are you working on?" Which is one reason I don't often come out and walk around.

Victoria Dailey:

How apropos it is that the natural beauty of Los Angeles is overlooked in favor of a false one!

Dana Hedgpeth:

The Washington region ranks as the most expensive place to live in the country.

Jennifer A. Kingson:

Washington D.C. may well be a flood zone by 2100, according to an estimate released last week.

Leon Panetta:

My experience in Washington is that logic alone doesn't work.

Richard Hamming:

If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.

Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen:

What Lockheed Martin was to the twentieth century, technology and cyber-security companies will be to the twenty-first.

Swift on Security:

Maybe computer security for the average person isn't a series of easy steps and absolutes they discard from our golden mouths of wise truths to spite the nerd underclass.

Perhaps it's the very design of General Purpose Computing. And who built this world of freedom? You did. We did.

So whose fault is it?

Melinda Gates:

Let your heart break. It will change what you do with your optimism.

Tim Cook:

We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick. This is my brick.

Claude Fischer:

Our ideology of being the exceptional land of opportunity is a hangover from a time when it was true -- but is no more.

The Economist's Washington Correspondent:

I thought I was unlucky graduating into the tech bust. I had no idea. Of course, the past ten years hasn't been lost in the way that the next ten years might be.

Alice Gregory:

I have spent my entire adult existence in a recession. The stock market crashed when I was a senior in college. I belong to a microgeneration whose moneymaking life has taken place in a pessimistic, alarmist era strewn with the detritus of failed, deliberately convoluted financial instruments. Like most people I talk to, I assume the forces that control the market are at best random and at worst rigged.

Michael Osinski:

When you're close to the money, you get the first cut. Oyster farmers eat lots of oysters, don't they?

Decius:

We're in a bad part of the cycle of human society. You and I are young enough that we'll see the other side of it, but we'll be old when we do.

Jake Norwood, on Longpoint:

It's a kind of prep school meets biker gang vibe.

Bill Roorbach, on The Luminaries:

It's a lot of fun, like doing a Charlotte Brontë-themed crossword puzzle while playing chess and Dance Dance Revolution on a Bongo Board.

Johnny Hwin, on British Airways UnGrounded:

It's like we're all just getting drunk together, but also really talking about interesting policy initiatives.

Molly Young, on the work of A.L. Kennedy:

Sentences like this pop up often, and reading them feels like the verbal equivalent of being tickled while crying.

Nicole Flatow:

Chief U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman pointed out that the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms -- not the right to use them -- and that the officers "grossly misconstrued" the Fourth Amendment when they claimed that it protects them, and not individuals who would be the subjects of police force or seizures.

Joseph Bottum:

America is filled with people frantically seeking confirmation of their own essential goodness. We are a nation of individuals desperate to stand on the side of morality -- anxious to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light.

U.S. 9th Circuit Court Chief Judge Alex Kozinski:

Executions are, in fact, brutal, savage events, and nothing the state tries to do can mask that reality. Nor should we. If we as a society want to carry out executions, we should be willing to face the fact that the state is committing a horrendous brutality on our behalf.

Timothy Noah:

Violent crime has fallen by 44 percent in America over the past two decades, but during that same period the prison population has more than doubled.

FBI Director James Comey:

I believe people should be skeptical of government power. I am.

Dr. Phillip Metzger:

The mountains have all been climbed, the continents explored, and the romance of sailing away on a tall ship to undiscovered islands is no more. What will fire the imaginations of the next generation?

Sophia Nguyen:

It's easy to think of motivated blindness and institutional inertia as something that happens only to others.

Alvaro Serrano:

If you aim to create a revolution, you must be willing to part with the existing preconceptions that are holding your competitors back. Only then will you be able to take a meaningful leap forward.

Marina Benjamin:

I am acutely aware of the threshold at which my daughter stands today. I want to wave at her in sympathy and recognition, and assure her it will turn out well. I want to tell her that on the other side of this difficult transition there will be freedoms and experiences she's never dreamt of, as well as new heights of confidence and competence. There will be deep friendships and deeper loves, the rollercoaster of university life and first jobs, independent travel, opportunities at every turn. I want to tell her that her dreams will become tangible. That her fears will drift into obscurity. That she will feel invincible.

But then I am overcome by a terrible sadness for my own lost opportunities, and by an ersatz nostalgia for paths not taken -- a missing, if you like, of what I never had, and a misplaced anxiety about all the future paths I shall never take, because with middle age comes a shrinking sense of the possible. Since half of me is lost in undifferentiated yearning for what might have been, I'm often unable to reassure my daughter with the right level of conviction. If I am to succeed in this task, I must first let go of my ghostly younger selves -- the grown-up version of putting away childish things.

Doris Lessing:

What's terrible is to pretend that second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don't need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.