may 2009

Where in the pantheon of American commercial titans does Jeffrey Bezos belong? Andrew Carnegie’s hearths forged the steel that became the skeleton of the railroad and the city. John D. Rockefeller refined 90 percent of American oil, which supplied the pre-electric nation with light. Bill Gates created a program that was considered a prerequisite for turning on a computer.

At 55, Bezos has never dominated a major market as thoroughly as any of these forebears, and while he is presently the richest man on the planet, he has less wealth than Gates did at his zenith. Yet Rockefeller largely contented himself with oil wells, pump stations, and railcars; Gates’s fortune depended on an operating system. The scope of the empire the founder and CEO of Amazon has built is wider. Indeed, it is without precedent in the long history of American capitalism.

The hypothetical couple were making $350,000 a year and just getting by, their income “barely” qualifying them as middle-class. Their budget, posted in September, showed how they “survived” in a city like San Francisco, spending more than $50,000 a year on child care and preschool, nearly $50,000 a year on their mortgage, and hefty amounts on vacations, entertainment, and a weekly date night—even as they saved for retirement and college in tax-advantaged accounts.

The internet, being the internet, responded with some combination of howling, baying, pitchfork-jostling, and scoffing. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York quipped that the thing the family was struggling with was math. Gabriel Zucman, a leading scholar of wealth and inequality, described the budget as laughable, while noting that it showed how much money consumption taxes could raise.

Dear Therapist,

Five months ago, my long-term girlfriend cheated on me. Our relationship had broken down due to poor communication, working too much, resentment, etc. While I was the one cheated on, I now fully acknowledge the part we both played, and after a period of acute anger, I came to the conclusion that I still love my girlfriend, and that I was as angry at the infidelity as at the fact that we had let the relationship get as low as it did. She also expressed deep regret, sorrow, and self-loathing for her actions. We had several long heart-to-heart conversations over the following weeks, and those conversations taught me new things about her. The process of repair is ongoing, but since the affair, we have been closer than we’d been in a long time.

Updated on October 20, 2019, at 9:32 p.m. ET

Mitt Romney is leaning forward in his chair, his eyes flashing, his voice sharp.

It’s a strange look for the 72-year-old senator, who typically affects a measured, somber tone when discussing Donald Trump’s various moral deficiencies. But after weeks of escalating combat with the president—over Ukraine, and China, and Syria, and impeachment—the gentleman from Utah suddenly appears ready to unload.

What set him off was my recitation of an argument I’ve heard some Republicans deploy lately to excuse Trump’s behavior. Electing a president, the argument goes, is like hiring a plumber—you don’t care about his character, you just want him to get the job done. Sitting in his Senate office, Romney is indignant. “Are you worried that your plumber overcharges you?” he asks. “Are you worried that the plumber’s going to scream at your kids? Are you worried that the plumber is going to squeal out of your driveway?” I am playing devil’s advocate; he is attempting an exorcism.

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This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish.

At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says. “So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”

President Donald Trump famously once said that he wouldn’t lose support even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York City. As his presidency enters its most dramatic phase yet, just one year ahead of the 2020 election, he might be right.

In mid-September, 94 percent of Republicans opposed impeachment. A month later—after the news about Trump’s fateful phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and after House Democrats formally launched an impeachment inquiry—their views are essentially unchanged. Even with these revelations, 93 percent of Republicans remained opposed to impeachment in mid-October, according to data released today from the Public Religion Research Institute. Of all Republican voters, two subgroups stand out for their unwavering support of Trump: those who primarily get their news from Fox, and white evangelical Christians.

It is easy to look at today’s crop of sinking IPOs—like Uber, Lyft, and Peloton—or scuttled public offerings, like WeWork, and see an eerie resemblance to the dot-com bubble that popped in 2000.

• Both then and now, consumer-tech companies spent lavishly on advertising and struggled to find a path to profit.

• Both then and now, companies that bragged about their ability to change the world admitted suddenly that they were running out of money.

• Both then and now, the valuations of once-heralded tech enterprises were halved in a matter of weeks.

• Both then and now, there was a widespread sense of euphoria curdling into soberness, washed down with the realization that thousands of workers in once-promising firms were poised to lose their jobs.

HBO’s Watchmen is the strangest show to come to TV in a minute: the kind of fictional world where FBI agents carry locked briefcases that contain giant blue dildos, police interrogations incorporate Grant Wood’s American Gothic, and a brazen set piece of a shoot-out between superheroes and white supremacists relies heavily (and explosively) on cows. Damon Lindelof’s new series, a long-anticipated “remix” of the cult 1980s graphic-novel series, is sublime and absurd. It’s a symphony in which the loudest note in every bar is proudly out of key. The plane it portrays, an alternative-history America in 2019, is at once disturbingly peculiar and unmistakably our own.

In this mirror version of reality, a superstar liberal president has managed to pass both a reparations bill and a gun-control bill, twin policies that have inflamed societal tensions past a breaking point. Cops now tend to be the victims of police-involved shootings, as a result of restrictions on their use of deadly force. After a wave of synchronized attacks on members of the police force in Tulsa, Oklahoma, officers there now cover their faces with yellow masks, making them look oddly like emoji. Midway through the first episode, as the Tulsa cops gather for an emergency confab wearing a variety of bizarre outfits to conceal their identities—red balaclavas, leather cloaks, even a tatty panda costume—it dawned on me. Watchmen is set in a world where there is no internet. But Watchmen itself is the internet. It’s a fictionalized manifestation of the things life online has begotten: polarization, anonymity, doxxing, red-pilling, weaponized nostalgia, conspiracy theories. The supposed imposition of cultural orthodoxy. A sense of victimization that’s twisted into racist resentment.

DUBLIN—Few people were talking about Irish reunification in the spring of 2016: Most assumed that the Good Friday Agreement had put the issue on ice for the foreseeable future. Northern Ireland’s mainly Protestant pro-British majority and the Catholic minority, which traditionally favored reuniting with the Republic of Ireland, had been living in peace after decades of sectarian violence. Where was the urgent need for such a drastic change?

Then the unforeseen happened. The United Kingdom voted narrowly to leave the European Union. Suddenly, Northern Ireland—which, as part of the U.K., had voted to remain in the EU—was to be taken out of the bloc; the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, an EU member state, would once again be a tangible barrier to movement and trade after a protracted period of near-invisibility. Warnings proliferated of the consequences—economic, security, political—of separating the two sides of the island of Ireland. Chief among these was the risk that the border would again be a flashpoint for conflict, a resumption of the Troubles, which killed more than 3,500 people over 30 years.

Several weeks ago, I met up with a friend in New York who suggested we grab a bite at a Scottish bar in the West Village. He had booked the table through something called Seated, a restaurant app that pays users who make reservations on the platform. We ordered two cocktails each, along with some food. And in exchange for the hard labor of drinking whiskey, the app awarded us $30 in credits redeemable at a variety of retailers.

I am never offended by freebies. But this arrangement seemed almost obscenely generous. To throw cash at people every time they walk into a restaurant does not sound like a business. It sounds like a plot to lose money as fast as possible—or to provide New Yorkers, who are constantly dining out, with a kind of minimum basic income.