FRANKLIN FOER

When I started off in journalism, you knew there was an audience out there and that you wanted people to read what you produced. But it also felt like you had a limited ability to shape the audience, or to acquire an audience, for what you were doing. So you didn't really think too much about that.

If I'm reading my Facebook feed, it's using algorithms, procedures, and methods to give me what I want, or what it thinks that I want, or what suits its business plan.

I'd actually argue that the best thing to happen to the 'Washington Post' was hiring Marty Baron, maybe the greatest newspaper editor of his generation.

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.

My hope is that we revive 'monopoly' as a core piece of political rhetoric that broadly denotes dominant firms with pernicious powers.

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.

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.

On its face, Donald Trump's hateful musings about women and his boastful claims of sexual dominance should be reason alone to drive him from polite society and certainly to blockade him from the West Wing. Yet somehow, his misogyny has instead propelled his campaign to the brink of the Republican nomination.

Self-publishing is fine. But in a world of self-publishing, where everything is about what you get on the back end, there's a serious disincentive from embarking on really important, vital projects.

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.

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

One of Trump's vulnerabilities is that he doesn't always vet his people, whether it's business partners, the dubious characters he retweets, or the foreign leaders who show up at his door.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Trump is a real estate guy who sucks up to power to get buildings built.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I think what's happening with book advances is something that most of the world just doesn't fully appreciate, especially when it comes to nonfiction, because writing a book of investigative journalism is an expensive endeavor, and the system works best if you have publishers making bets on authors.

Not even Trump's father's wealth, nor his father's faith in his son's destiny, could save Trump from incessant discipline. At the age of 13, he was shipped off to the New York Military Academy, which employed brutal tactics for the remaking of delinquent character, even resorting to violence to assert control over the boys.