Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.

Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought.

Today, we have our own concentrations of economic power. Instead of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, the Union Pacific Railroad, and J. P. Morgan and Company, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.

With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.

Putin stands for the opposite of a universal ideology; he has become an arch-nationalist of a pre-Cold War type, making mystic appeals to motherland and religion.

It's essential for the U.S. and Europe to prevent Putin from going farther and reversing the hard-won independence of former Soviet republics.

Trump has seized the Republican nomination by finding scapegoats for the economic hardships and disintegrating lives of working-class whites while giving these voters a reassuring but false promise of their restoration to the center of American life.

The Princeton economist Alan Krueger has demonstrated that societies with higher levels of income inequality are societies with lower levels of social mobility.

Oprah is just this goddess presiding over so much of American life, and her story is really interesting - the way she made herself, and the ruthlessness it took, and also the fantasizing that it took.

On foreign policy, Obama has talked softly and carried a big stick.

What the Web has never figured out is how to pay for reporting, which, with the collapse of print newspapers, is in desperately short supply, and without which even the most prolific commenters will someday run out of things to say.

The invisibility of work and workers in the digital age is as consequential as the rise of the assembly line and, later, the service economy.

That's why I'm not on Twitter and don't have an iPhone. It's not because I'm superior to it: it's because I would be a slave to it, and I don't want that to happen.

Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.

Everything seems set up for success in digital journalism - money, eyeballs, software, brands.

Millions don't rally to the banner of Uncertainty.

In its lowest, most common form, inspiration is simple charisma that becomes magnified by the media, as with Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton.

Obama offers himself as a catalyst by which disenchanted Americans can overcome two decades of vicious partisanship, energize our democracy, and restore faith in government.

I think the mix of narrative and analysis that the 'New Yorker' requires is a perfect expression of what my parents each gave me.

The libertarian worship of individual freedom, and contempt for social convention, comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up.

No-one can say when the unwinding began, when the coil that held America together in its secure and sometime shifting grip first gave way.

'The Assassins' Gate' is a very tightly controlled story of the ideas that led to the war and the consequences of those ideas in Iraq, and there is no doubt about where it is going and what kind of groundwork is being laid.

Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.

It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.