“Good spectator sports share certain fundamentals. Their competitors battle head-to-head. Their winners are determined objectively: fastest runner, most points. They are refereed, not judged.”

“Downhill track sports like luge are technology battles, as exciting as a NASCAR qualifying day.”

“Economics pretends to be a science. Its practitioners fill blackboards with equations and clog computers with data. But it is really a faith, or more accurately a set of overlapping and squabbling ...”

“Did anyone in the White House or the N.S.A or the C.I.A. consider flying to Hong Kong and treating Mr. Snowden like a human being, offering him a chance to testify before Congress and a fair trial?”

“It's no secret that big institutional investors have a lot of advantages on Wall Street. They get the first chance to buy hot initial public offerings. They get to meet in person with companies' ma...”

“Big banks have long had private equity divisions that put up capital for deals too complex or risky for individual shareholders to finance.”

“I picture it like Judgement Day,' he says finally, his eyes on the water. 'We'll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We'll meet in that new place, all of us together...”

“There are few times that I feel more at peace, more in tune, more Zen, if you will, than when I force myself to unplug.”

“[B]ecause the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. ...”

“People don't always need a name.”

“I stole the very shiniest words and hoarded them all up until they made something worth having.”

“Sometimes a name seems our most arbitrary possession,and sometimes it seems like the grain in a rocklike a sculptor's hunk of Italian marble: Whack itand you might get either your first glimpse of ...”