George Packer

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

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

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

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

The information age has made Thiel rich, but it has also been a disappointment to him. It hasn't created enough jobs, and it hasn't produced revolutionary improvements in manufacturing and productivity. The creation of virtual worlds turns out to be no substitute for advances in the physical world.

To many book professionals, Amazon is a ruthless predator. The company claims to want a more literate world — and it came along when the book world was in distress, offering a vital new source of sales.

Gingrich was a far more volatile and aggressive individual than Boehner, but the institutional norms of self-restraint, and perhaps even self-interest, have broken down under the pressure of an increasingly abnormal Republican Party.

I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir 'Goodbye to All That', and a civilian memoir, 'Testament of Youth', by Vera Brittain.

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.

I actually think that self-interest is overrated as an all-purpose guide to political motive. It leaves out something at least as powerful and immovable — individual psychology.

Walmart's period of explosive growth coincided with decades of wage stagnation and deindustrialization. By applying relentless downward pressure on prices and wages, the company came to dominate both consumer spending and employment in small towns and rural areas across the middle of the country.

Before Google, and long before Facebook, Bezos had realized that the greatest value of an online company lay in the consumer data it collected.

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.

What can one man do even if he is the president?

Millions don't rally to the banner of Uncertainty.

The hollowing out of the heartland was good for Walmart's bottom line: its slogan might have been an amoral maxim attributed to Lenin — 'The worse, the better'.

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.

Al Qaeda asks its recruits to establish their bona fides as a condition of membership, even requiring answers to a long questionnaire. But ISIS has democratized and globalized jihad by lowering the entry bar to an eve-of-destruction YouTube pledge of allegiance to the caliphate — and even that could probably be waived.

It's — the working class of San Francisco and the Bay Area is being pushed out of its old neighborhoods because of the skyrocketing cost of housing, and there's no real working class left because these are jobs for engineers and managers and designers — very smart people.

Foreign policy exactly suits Obama's strong points as a leader, which turn out not to be giving the masses a clear sense of direction and hope, but instead exercising good judgment on a case-by-case basis while thinking many steps ahead of the present moment.