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.

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.

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.

There are, in fact, apps you can use to measure how many times you check your phone, and I shudder to think how many times I check my phone. I'm sure it would be probably in the hundreds of times that I check over the course of the day.

I'm not going to throw the towel in just because things are not going great for the first time in my career.

I know people seek me out to be their mentor, and I've chosen a few people I'm really invested in and nurturing their career and their aesthetic and just their person.

We really wanted to create an album that had no boundary or limit to it. There's nothing to say that we couldn't release a song that belongs on 'The Stage' 20 years into our career. We want it to be an album that constantly grows with what we want to do, and that's what we did.

For the majority of my career, I've been surprised that I've been able to sustain any kind of a plan. I was always happy to have the job, and I was having a good time. I was growing. But I don't feel all that strongly about my work.