Zitat des Tages von George Packer:
Over the years, America had become more like Wal-Mart. It had gotten cheap. Prices were lower, and wages were lower. There were fewer union factory jobs and more part-time jobs as greeters.
We have at least learned that the offspring of presidents don't necessarily make good politicians themselves.
I am not a pure fiction writer, nor am I an academic writer. Somehow I ended up in this blended area of literary journalism.
It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.
Millions don't rally to the banner of Uncertainty.
I need to protect myself from my own addictive impulse.
I don't know if it's a male thing, but I've always been interested in how people respond to the stresses and dangers of war, how they react under fire.
WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a cell of activists that is releasing information designed to embarrass people in power.
I have my sympathies and also my critical views, and they aren't much of a secret, but my first job is to see and hear and think about what I've seen and heard.
I don't think they need to be nice to reporters, but the White House seems to imagine that releasing information is like a tap that can be turned on and off at their whim.
Inequality saps the economy by draining the buying power of Americans whose incomes have stagnated, forcing them to rely on debt to fund education, housing, and health care.
Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
While starving refugees in Homs were providing target practice for government snipers, Bashar al-Assad's strongest international backer was in Sochi, at the Iceberg Skating Palace, visibly moved, smiling with deep satisfaction, as the Russians beautifully glided and leaped their way to the gold medal in the team event.
The war in Afghanistan is not of a peace with the rest of Obama's worldview. It's a holdover from the era that his election was supposed to bring to a close.
Everything seems set up for success in digital journalism - money, eyeballs, software, brands.
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 worked as a carpenter for a few years. I began writing. I wrote a book about my time in Africa - that came out in 1988 - called 'The Village of Waiting.'
As America has grown less economically equal, a citizen's ability to move upward has fallen behind that of citizens in other Western democracies. We are no longer the country where anyone can become anything.
Too many talented and supremely calculating politicians, including Nixon and Clinton, have destroyed their careers, or come close, by acting in ways that were obviously against their own interests.
What can one man do even if he is the president?
A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another.
In its lowest, most common form, inspiration is simple charisma that becomes magnified by the media, as with Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton.
'Charlie Hebdo' had been nondenominational in its satire, sticking its finger into the sensitivities of Jews and Christians, too - but only Muslims responded with threats and acts of terrorism.
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 next great technology revolution might be around the corner, but it won't automatically improve most people's lives. That will depend on politics, which is indeed ugly but also inescapable.
Jay-Z has kind of shown that you can get to the very top without waiting, without following rules. In fact, it's better if you don't. People will admire you more if you break the rules.
Every movement, to stay alive - a very difficult thing to do historically - has to find a way to harness that initial surge of emotion and turn it to the hard, steady, un-sexy work of recruiting new members, strategizing, negotiating with those in power, keeping itself going.
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.
Pay attention to other people's nightmares because they might be contagious.
For 20 years, my mother, my sister and I had seldom spoken of my father. If he happened to come up in conversation, pain and embarrassment entered the room and stayed until he disappeared back into the silence with which we all felt more at ease.
Ambition, of course, is the politician's currency.
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.
Together, Apple and Walmart represent the intense separation of American life into blue and red, rich and poor, overpriced and undersold, hyperconnected and left behind.
A great writer requires a great biography, and a great biography must tell the truth.
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.
Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.