Franklin Foer Quotes
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Mark Zuckerberg talks about telepathy, and Elon Musk has invested in trying to create a brain-machine interface.
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From the start, the promise of Jurgen Klinsmann as manager of the U.S. men's national team was revolution: gritty, plodding American soccer would give way to attacking flair; the parade of journeymen would end; an era of skilled stylists would begin.
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On its face, Donald Trump's hateful musings about women and his boastful claims of sexual dominance should be reason alone to drive him from polite society and certainly to blockade him from the West Wing. Yet somehow, his misogyny has instead propelled his campaign to the brink of the Republican nomination.
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When you're staring at your phone to navigate and being led places, you do become less aware of your environment, and the journey becomes kind of automated. There is an aliveness that comes with having to puzzle out directions for yourself. And you have to ask other people for help, which creates opportunity for social connection.
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The first book advance I got was paid out in thirds. And over time, as I've had different deals, the advances get chopped up into ever-smaller parcels.
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Donald Trump's interest in Russia dates back to Soviet times. In fact, there's extraordinary footage of him shaking hands with Mikhail Gorbachev. It comes from 1988, the peak of perestroika and Gorbachev's efforts to charm the American public.
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The genesis of Donald Trump's relationship with Paul Manafort begins with Roy Cohn. That Roy Cohn: Joe McCarthy's heavy-lidded henchman, lawyer to the Genovese family. During the '70s, Trump and his father hired Cohn as their lawyer to defend the family against a housing discrimination suit.
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It's very un-American to say nice things about elites. Elites are often terrible. It's not like we've ever had a perfect set of benevolent democratic elites ruling over our country. But the fact of the matter is that a representative system of democracy delegates power to elites.
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Apple was very important in terms of disrupting the music business and remaking the television business. They made it harder for people to make money on the things that they produce. In news, they've created Apple News, and they've tried to steer people towards information.
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Mark Zuckerberg has never really had pressure put on him. He's an engineer, and he's created this perfect system that is Facebook, and he's always been concerned about the internal beauty and logic of this creation that he's created. I don't think that the human implications of what he's created have often been apparent to him.
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After the global financial crisis of 2008, populist uprisings had sprouted across Europe. Putin and his strategists sensed the beginnings of a larger uprising that could upend the Continent and make life uncomfortable for his geostrategic competitors.
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Monopolists always defend their monopolies by arguing that competition is wasteful. When the railroad barons completed their monopoly, they argued it would be wasteful to have competing rail lines, AT&T said the same thing. But today, the size and scope of these monopolies is different.
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I think what's happening with book advances is something that most of the world just doesn't fully appreciate, especially when it comes to nonfiction, because writing a book of investigative journalism is an expensive endeavor, and the system works best if you have publishers making bets on authors.
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My dad has been in the fight against monopoly since it wasn't so cool. I'm sure I've turned to the subject to please him, though I think he might consider some of my arguments a little flamethrowing for his tastes.
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Ukrainians use the term 'political technologist' as a favored synonym for electoral consultant. Trump turned to Manafort for what seemed at first a technical task: Manafort knows how to bullwhip and wheedle delegates at a contested convention.
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Trump has emphatically denied ties to Russia - a claim refuted by his Twitter feed and a cursory Google search. Putin says his government had nothing to do with the hack of the DNC computers, even though it carelessly left a trail of crumbs tracing back to his intelligence services. The cunning liar is exploiting the blundering one.
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The sense of crisis is everything for Trump - even if it's largely invented. His depiction of darkness justifies his candidacy, the need to violently shake the system. His ability to conjure fear is what distinguished him from all those career pols he has vanquished. And it suits his ego.
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As parents, we have kids who reflect back to us our addiction to devices, and we have all sorts of worries about whether this is a healthy thing.
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There's an oft-used shorthand for the technologist's view of the world. It is assumed that libertarianism dominates Silicon Valley, and that isn't wholly wrong. High-profile devotees of Ayn Rand can be found there.
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The demise of Jeb Bush has been a source of immeasurable pleasure for, well, nearly everyone.
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Once upon a time, gatekeepers were newspaper publishers and magazine editors and people who ran radio stations and news networks. And they decided what went above the fold and what went on page A10.
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My hope is that we revive 'monopoly' as a core piece of political rhetoric that broadly denotes dominant firms with pernicious powers.
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Google's ability to pick winners and losers in the information world is a menace. These companies have the ability to determine which media companies are successful and which ones are failures. If I adopt a business plan that doesn't line up with Google's, then they're not going to reward me.
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When the mayor of Sao Paulo wanted to increase bus fare by 21 centavos in 2013, the country erupted in the largest mass protests in its history. It wasn't a dramatic hike - just nine cents - but a perfect symbol of the increasing burdens on the working poor, forced to fend with an inadequate system, insensitive to their plight.