George Packer

“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.”

“The similarities are limited but real. They amount to a shared disgust with politics as usual in America. The Tea Party focuses on the federal government; Occupy Wall Street focuses on corpo...”

“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, pundi...”

“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 sour...”

“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 internationa...”

“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.”

“Walmart's period of explosive growth coincided with decades of wage stagnation and deindustrialization. By applying relentless downward pressure on prices and wages, the company came to domi...”

“All over Africa, people are wearing what Americans once wore and no longer want. Visit the continent, and you'll find faded remnants of secondhand clothing in the strangest of places.”

“The base of the party, the middle-aged white working class, has suffered at least as much as any demographic group because of globalization, low-wage immigrant labor, and free trade. Trump s...”

“It's - the working class of San Francisco and the Bay Area is being pushed out of its old neighborhoods because of the skyrocketing cost of housing, and there's no real working class left be...”

“On foreign policy, Obama has talked softly and carried a big stick.”

“Certain murderous ideas are in the air worldwide, and they are finding individuals in scattered places in different ways, and every attack spreads them further, plants an idea in a new head.”

“Every movement, to stay alive - a very difficult thing to do historically - has to find a way to harness that initial surge of emotion and turn it to the hard, steady, un-sexy work of recrui...”

“By the fall of 2007, my last remaining Iraqi friend in Baghdad had left. Once he was gone, my connection to the country and the war began to thin, even as the terror diminished. I missed the...”

“I have my sympathies and also my critical views, and they aren't much of a secret, but my first job is to see and hear and think about what I've seen and heard.”

“Partly what I'm writing about is the way taboos get toppled.”

“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.”

“Often, foreign policy - which, by definition, is largely out of American control - is simply a matter of not doing the wrong thing, the unwise thing.”

“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, '...”

“America's vast population of working poor can only get so poor before even Walmart is out of reach.”