For a start, most companies have a split personality when it comes to customers. On the one hand, C.E.O.s routinely describe service as essential to success, and they are well aware that, thanks to the Internet, bad service can now inflict far more damage than before; the old maxim was that someone who had a bad experience in your store would tell ten people, but these days it’s more like thousands or even, as in Carroll’s case, millions. On the other hand, customer service is a classic example of what businessmen call a “cost center”—a division that piles up expenses without bringing in revenue—and most companies see it as tangential to their core business, something they have to do rather than something they want to do.

James Surowiecki in the New Yorker.

“I think intellectuals have a primary duty to dissent not from the conventional wisdom of the age (though that too) but, and above all, from the consensus of their own community.”

Tony Judt, who died last week.

“The brains of members of the Press departments of motion-picture studios resemble soup at a cheap restaurant. It is wiser not to stir them.”

P.G. Wodehouse, Blandings Castle and Elsewhere

“Men are esteem engines; women are perpetual emotion machines.”

From the Guardian‘s obituary of Richard Gregory, the late, great neuroscientist .