George Packer Quotes
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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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Lawyers, judges, doctors, shrinks, accountants, investigators and, not least, journalists could not do the most basic tasks without a veil of secrecy. Why shouldn't the same be true of those professionals who happen to be government officials?
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I think the mix of narrative and analysis that the 'New Yorker' requires is a perfect expression of what my parents each gave me.
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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.
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Politics demands certain skills honed by experience, just as journalism does, just as acting does.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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How a candidate runs shapes how a president governs.
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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.
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I need to protect myself from my own addictive impulse.
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The best example of Obama's success in foreign policy is Iran.
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It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.
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The constellation of opinion called the blogosphere consists, like the stars themselves, partly of gases. This is what makes blogs addictive - that is, both pleasurable and destructive: They're so easy to consume and so endlessly available.
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Liberal democracies like ours seem, for the most part, to have learned how to avoid meticulously planned mass-casualty plots with the complexity and scale of 9/11. But they don't know how to keep their citizens safe at night clubs and concerts, in supermarkets, on beachfront promenades, from truck drivers.
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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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The reformocons court right-wing censure simply by acknowledging that the middle class is under pressure and that government has a role to play beyond cutting taxes.
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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.
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Afghanistan can't police its borders, and its neighbors give sanctuary and assistance to insurgents.
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Last year, in the year 2008, it just became normal to watch great American institutions crumble, almost dissolve like sand.