Franklin Foer

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. ”

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. ”

The greatest miracle of the Internet is that it exists - the second greatest is that it persists. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

The Internet was invented in an age when our entire approach to regulation has been extremely lax, and so you'd think, 'OK, there might be a law on the books that governs how these corporations can handle our data.' ”

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. ”

I'm reading the way a lot of technology executives have decried 'gatekeepers' and 'traditional media,' and that one of the promises of 'new media' was that it would break the chokehold that old media companies had on public opinion. ”

Brazil is strewn with ruins of projects - refineries, power plants - begun but never finished. Most of this investment never landed in places or industries that really meshed with the trajectory of the global economy. This wasn't state-of-the art industrial policy. The projects seemed curiously nostalgic. ”