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...

This isn’t to deny that there were fierce arguments, at the time and ever since, about the causes and goals of both the Civil War and the Second World War. But 1861 and 1941 each...

The Road to Hell.

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.

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

The attacks of 9/11 were the biggest surprise in American history, and for the past ten years we haven’t stopped being surprised. The war on terror has had no discernible trajectory, and, unlike other military...

Good writing requires a character with a voice. Usually, the first sound bite is not the whole story.

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...

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

[O]nce demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn’t much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate’s mood.

lies a distance even greater than the 8,000 miles from Washington to Baghdad.

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

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.

[T]he enduring problem for liberals, as for everyone else, is not whether history will judge them wise or foolish regarding the war on terrorism; it is, rather, the way that the past decade has splintered...

In this country, Iraq was almost always about winning the argument.

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

I’ve been interested in American politics since I was eight. That was in 1968. It was an interesting year. I was a huge Eugene McCarthy supporter, so I guess he was the first senator I...

This malignant persistence since September 11th is the biggest surprise of all. In previous decades, sneak attacks, stock-market crashes, and other great crises became hinges on which American history swung in dramatically new directions. But...

The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq

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...

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.

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

The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq

It’s a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it’s true.

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...

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 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.

Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well....

Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.

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.

Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked.Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.

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.

With work increasingly invisible, it’s much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.

I never found the questions easy to answer, and the manner in which the country argued with itself seemed wholly inadequate to the scale of what we were about to get into. I first went...

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 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...

At the heart of the matter is a battle between wish and fear. Fear generally proves stronger than a wish, but it leaves a taste of disappointment on the tongue.

the FEMA of the defense department.

Putin stands for the opposite of a universal ideology; he has become an arch-nationalist of a pre-Cold War type, making mystic appeals to motherland and religion.