Quotes from Franklin Foer

Google is arguably one of the greatest inventions. The search engine is one of the greatest inventions in human history.

Once upon a time, if you were going to get a loan from me, I would have had to look at your file, and I would have to make a decision about whether youre going to get a loan. Maybe we would meet and talk about it. There would be some level of human involvement and human interaction. Now, a lot of this is determined by an algorithm.

Soccer isn't the same as Bach or Buddhism. But it is often more deeply felt than religion, and just as much a part of the community's fabric, a repository of traditions.

Back in the seventies, Herbert Simon, the Nobel-winning economist, took these inchoate sentiments and explained them rigorously: "What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

The contemplative life remains freely available to us through our choices—what we read and buy, how we commit to leisure and self-improvement, the passing over of empty temptation, our preservation of the quiet spaces, an intentional striving to become the masters of our mastery.

Indeed, this is an important characteristic of the globalization debate: the tendency toward glorifying all things indigenous even when they deserve to be left in the past.

it's the most familial-based societies where the sense of obligation is strongest, that breed the worst nepotism and cronyism.

The paradox of Italian soccer). As everyone knows, Italian men are the most foppish representatives of their sex on the planet. They smear on substantial quantities of hair care products and expend considerable mental energies color-coordinating socks with belts. Because of their dandyism, the world has Vespa, Prada, and Renzo Piano. With such theological devotion to aesthetic pleasure, it is truly perplexing that their national style of soccer should be so devoid of this quality.

Politically I am absolutely honest, which is to say, as honest as possible; which is to say, honest more or less; which is to say, far more honest than the general.

I believe that the rising of the proletariat, if it ever comes in this country, will end in a colossal victory for capitalism—that capitalism, as at present and in the past, will play off one mob against another, and pick the pockets of both.

If we believe we're being watched, we're far less likely to let our minds roam toward opinions that require courage or might take us beyond the bounds of acceptable opinion. We begin to bend our opinions to please our observer.

It's a basic, intuitive right, worthy of enshrinement: Citizens, not the corporations that stealthily track them, should own their own data.

But in the end, the hackers were misunderstood figures. They wanted nothing more than to belong, to subsume their brilliant selves in an even more incandescent whole, to lose themselves in the poetry of community.

Just as the world took a neoliberal turn, the National Science Foundation conceived a multi-year plan for privatizing the internet….The euphoria of capitalism's triumph set the tone for the internet's emergence.

Even though Silicon Valley's monopolies exist for the sake of profit, they view themselves as revolutionary agents, elevating the world to the state of oneness that Brand spent his life chasing.

Just as Nabisco and Kraft wanted to change how we eat and what we eat, Amazon, Facebook, and Google aspire to alter how we read and what we read.

Intellectuals, freelance writers, investigative journalists, and midlist novelists are the analog to the family farmers, who have always struggled but simply can't compete in this transformed economy.

There are only so many hours in the day for amateur pursuits—and very few writers are as gifted as Wallace Stevens or T. S. Eliot or Sylvia Plath, able to generate something lasting from stolen moments.

In the olden days, big houses in New York impeded creativity—editing, printing, distributing a handful of volumes each year. If a writer somehow failed to catch the fancy of a New York publisher, she was consigned to irrelevance. Amazon disrupted the hell out of that arrangement. Anyone with a novel in a desk drawer could publish directly to Amazon.

Of course, formulas always existed in journalism. When I was just getting into the business, 'Time' and 'Newsweek' knew if they could put Jesus' face on the cover that it would do really well on the newsstands. So every year, they would put Jesus' face on the newsstand. There was a formula there.

Computer scientists have built a set of massive DNS databases, which provide fragmentary histories of communications flows, in part to create an archive of malware: a kind of catalog of the tricks bad actors have tried to pull, which often involve masquerading as legitimate actors.

As the 2016 campaign has graphically illustrated, Trump doesn't treat rivals gently. Testifying before a congressional committee in 1993, he began with his rote protestations of friendship.

Having a friend in the Kremlin would help Trump fulfill his longtime dream of planting his name in the Moscow skyline - a dream that he pursued even as he organized his presidential campaign.

An article in the 'Moscow Times' described Trump as the city's first grand builder since Stalin.