George Packer Quotes
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If the presidential nominating process were an international sports competition, one would assume that top officials of both parties were taking envelopes of cash from town chairs in Durham and precinct captains in Waterloo.
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It's a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it's true.
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A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another.
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The difference between a reporter, a newspaper columnist, a paid speaker, a television personality, a radio talk show host, a blogger, a movie producer, a publicist, and a political strategist, is growing less - and not more - distinct.
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If you've ever left a bag of clothes outside the Salvation Army or given to a local church drive, chances are that you've dressed an African.
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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.
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Part of the mystique of blogs is their protean quality: They work both sides of the divide between politics and media, further blurring the already fuzzy distinctions between reporter, pundit, political operative, activist, and citizen.
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The Iraq war was always a long shot. But it was made immeasurably longer by its principal architects in Washington, including Douglas Feith, who ignored expert advice, reserved most of their effort for fighting each other in ideological battles, and regarded the Iraqi people as an afterthought.
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In its lowest, most common form, inspiration is simple charisma that becomes magnified by the media, as with Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton.
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The Senate was an odd compromise between the founders and the early leaders of the republic who wanted a single house which was based on popular sovereignty representing the people and those founders who wanted two houses, the upper house, the Senate, being the more aristocratic.
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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.
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The Olympics are never just about sports.
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Obama is the splendid fruit of a meritocracy.
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Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Discerning the legal difference between what WikiLeaks did and what news organizations do is difficult and would set a terrible precedent.
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Americans almost never elect presidents on the basis of foreign policy.
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With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.
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No one pretends anymore that the Olympics are just about sports. It's routine to talk about what effect holding the Games in this or that capital will have on the host country's international reputation, how a nation's prestige can be raised by its medal count.
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I am never going to be able to rest easy in having established a posthumous connection to my father. I'll always be groping for what I can't have.
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Millions don't rally to the banner of Uncertainty.