American - Novelist | August 13, 1960 -
Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
George Packer
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It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.
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Before Google, and long before Facebook, Bezos had realized that the greatest value of an online company lay in the consumer data it collected.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.
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Everything seems set up for success in digital journalism - money, eyeballs, software, brands.
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Much of the international unease with the Sochi Games has focused on the threat of terrorism, Putin's domestic repressiveness, and the Russian campaign of anti-gay propaganda.
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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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Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.
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