Quotes from Anand Giridharadas

Language is one of the only things that we truly share, and I sometimes used this joint inheritance to obfuscate and deflect and justify myself: to re-brand what was good for me as something appearing good for us both, when I threw around terms like 'the sharing economy' and 'disruption' and 'global resourcing.'

I'm a son of immigrants. I'm not going to reduce my commitment to immigration. But can I empathize with the fact that if your town was 95 percent all white and now it's down to 60, that that can scare you? Can I empathize with that? Yeah.

Americans don't realize how difficult it is to create a Harvard.

America has two clear tiers of workers: contractors and employees. The former have few regulatory protections; the latter have many.

Wealth plays out in the political sphere in all kinds of ways, often personally. Can Hillary Clinton represent the interests of working people when she and her husband have taken so much money from Wall Street? Was Mitt Romney's private-equity business too ruthless with workers?

For our family, learning was everything. Homework came first; books, being sacred, were never to be left on the floor.

In Europe, more than in the United States, worldly people, faced with my Indian skin, reflexively laud my 'ancient,' 'beautiful' origins, which is heartier praise than Cleveland usually gets from Europeans.

America has deep, fundamental institutions that take a long time to replicate.

In my reporting, I've found that real change escapes many change-makers because powerful illusions guide their projects.

My hairstyle is not common in India, where my parents come from.

I'm a Cleveland Indian by birth.

In an economy increasingly dominated by network effects, peer-to-peer transactions, self-regulation, and contract labor, the old frameworks are woefully irrelevant.

Our technology promises the magic of constant connectedness. Yet we feel loss in being atomized on separate screens, trapped in filter bubbles of belief, bobbing in a sharing economy in which the technologists seem to own all the shares.

My mother grew up strong. She was a charismatic leader among her peers, staging plays, organizing projects, raising money for charity; she was fiercely protective of her younger brother, with whom she shared a passion for jazz and rock and roll.

IT put India on the map of the world and told Indians that they are somebody in the world. There is something about technology that is very empowering: 'We are designing software for the best companies in the world.'

I have always found it jarring to encounter people born and raised in, say, Switzerland, who are denied its citizenship and still considered Algerians or Turks.

To have come of age during and after the global financial crisis of 2008 is to belong to a generation often unable to do what an American could once expect, and to do what was once expected: Get a job, pay off student loans, and find a place of your own.

When it comes to granting unconditional birthright citizenship, the United States and Canada are alone in the industrialized world: North American exceptionalism, you can call it.

Our globalized, automated economy is full of magic - Everyday Low Prices and next-day delivery on that single Gatorade you one-clicked. But it is also full of loss - of jobs, of the dignity of steady work, of chances to rise.

In America, where no one judged or supervised her, where my father was too busy eating her cooking to notice whether she was eating it, too, my mother found herself newly enchanted by the taste of food.

Taking offense is, in fact, one of the few things that brings us together.

To spend time in Silicon Valley in a year of political upheaval is, on one level, soothing. It is pleasant to hear talk of wearables, walled gardens, and disruptive beverages in between updates about mass deportation.

I am very happy to be an American. I realize what a valuable inheritance that is.

Most of us are too enmeshed in communities to live our ideals. Outsiders have less to lose.