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
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.
Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.
It's a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it's true.
Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
I don't know if it's a male thing, but I've always been interested in how people respond to the stresses and dangers of war, how they react under fire. In the extremity of war, character is revealed.
Twitter is crack for media addicts,
Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.
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.
One book that I heard was circulating the Green Zone was "Bureaucracy Does Its Thing" by Robert Komer , who worked for President [Lindon] Johnson in Saigon. This book is about the inevitably of screwing up when a country takes on a war with so little understanding of the country they are fighting.
Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solutions to large collective problems, because those problems no longer seem very collective.
Inequality provokes a generalized anger that finds targets where it can--immigrants, foreign countries, American elites, government in all forms--and it rewards demagogues while discrediting reformers.
Like an odorless gas, [inequality] pervades every corner of the United States and saps the strength of the country's democracy. But it seems impossible to find the source and shut it off.
When I interviewed Paul Bremer in his office he had almost no books on his shelves. He had a couple of management books, like "Leadership" by Rudolph Giuliani . I didn't take it as an encouraging sign.
We have all the information in the universe at our fingertips, while our most basic problems go unsolved year after year...All around, we see dazzling technological change, but no progress.