Quotes from Franklin Foer

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.

Along with Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple, these companies are in a race to become our 'personal assistant.' They want to wake us in the morning, have their artificial intelligence software guide us through our days, and never quite leave our sides.

The demise of Jeb Bush has been a source of immeasurable pleasure for, well, nearly everyone.

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.

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.

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.

Putin has made a habit of supporting far-right candidates who undermine his foes in Europe; perhaps he never could have imagined such a character taking root on American soil. Trump's reasons for aligning with Putin have been more innocent, if no less dangerous.

We think of Netflix as a great personalization machine. It understands how you love French midcentury cinema and British murder mysteries, so examples of those pop up in your personalization engine. But you're also getting fed a lot of Netflix content.

I have really no desire to go back into management ever again.

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.

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.

If you're presented with choices that steer you toward your worst instincts, that's what you'll choose. If I'm presented with Snickers bars, I won't necessarily seek out kale.

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.

I look at the way that my kids interact with technology, and it becomes a mirror to the ways in which I myself interact with technology. I can see the ways in which that addiction and compulsion starts to settle in on them, and it's much more unnerving to see it in them than it is to experience it myself.

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.

There's no reason why there needs to be one search engine or one social network or one store that we buy all of our crap from. It's possible to imagine a world in which there's actually competition.

We've been merging with tools since the beginning of human evolution, and arguably, that's one of the things that makes us human beings.

Trump uses the phrase 'America First,' only dimly aware that he is repeating a phrase from the interwar years and indifferent to its historic resonances. But he compulsively echoes that period - another time when leaders described the world in apocalyptic terms.

Google helps us sort the Internet by providing a sense of hierarchy to information. Facebook uses its algorithms and its intricate understanding of our social circles to filter the news we encounter. Amazon bestrides book publishing with its overwhelming hold on that market.

In the epic war over Silicon Valley's intellectual property, Bill Gates was on the side of licensing copyright and robust protections for intellectual property. He wasn't on the side of the hackers, and he didn't want information to be free.

Booksellers initially thought of Amazon as their best friend. They were coming in, and they were challenging Barnes and Noble, and Borders, which were the big, dominant corporations of the day, and that they would disrupt them and make them less powerful, but they could never envision that Amazon would overtake them all.

Who can complain about the price that Google is charging you? Or who can complain about Amazon's prices; they are simply lower than the competition's. And that's why I think we need to shift back to a more Brandeisian conception of antitrust, where we consider values other than simply efficiency and low prices.

When Trump started belittling him, Jeb reverted to Bush form. He couldn't understand how anyone could question his noble pursuit of public service. In the face of Trump's attacks, he looked hurt and stunned.

In mid-2014, 51 percent of American Republicans viewed Putin very unfavorably. Two years later, 14 percent did. By January, 75 percent of Republicans said Trump had the 'right approach' toward Russia.