George Packer
George Packer
George Packeris an American journalist, novelist, and playwright. He is best known for his writings for The New Yorker about U.S. foreign policy and for his book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq. He also wrote The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, covering the history of America from 1978 to 2012. That book won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in November 2013...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth13 August 1960
CountryUnited States of America
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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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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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It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.
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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 .
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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.
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Everything seems set up for success in digital journalism - money, eyeballs, software, brands.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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.