“One of the guiding beliefs behind Joan’s Technique is that films have become too much about conflict. When one of the directors asks her how she feels about Joseph Campbell’s theory of the hero’s journey, Joan pulls her sweater over her head. She tells the class she wants them to understand that conflict is one of the cards in their decks, not all of them.”

“My friend Jamie Wilkinson once told me about a decision he’d made. No more forever projects, he said. From now on, every project is one-time-only. Treat beginnings like endings: celebrate them, document them, let someone else pick up where you leave off. If the project’s worth repeating, there’s nothing to say you can’t still be the standard-bearer. But at least it’s a choice. By ending well, you give yourself the freedom to begin again.”

“There was an arrogance among us. We snickered at the departing media dinosaurs, and imagined ourselves to be the new stars of the show—the future of our industry. The future was short lived. It wasn’t too long before we were the dinosaurs, ushered out by cost effective curation.”

“Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism – it’s turning God into a nature god. And science needs religion in order to have a conscience, to know that, just because something is possible, it may not be a good thing to do.”

“Success in the coming era will increasingly involve effectively navigating a profusion of smaller networks, and a government that wants to help people flourish will need to retool—focusing more on enabling bottom-up, incremental improvements and less on managing top-down, centralized systems. Both empowering individuals and offering them security will look rather different in this era.”

“Using two Cas9 enzymes, the scientists could make a pair of snips, chopping out any segment of DNA they wanted. They could then coax a cell to stitch a new gene into the open space. Doudna and her colleagues thus invented a biological version of find-and-replace — one that could work in virtually any species they chose to work on.”