The Only Reason To Be In Business

A.j. Liebling, One Of My Heroes, Used To Say That He Could Write Better Than Anyone Who Wrote Faster, And Faster Than Anyone Who Could Write Better. I'm One Nine-hundredth As Good As Liebling, But That Principle May Slightly Apply.

The World Is A Crazy, Beautiful, Ugly Complicated Place, And It Keeps Moving On From Crisis To Strangeness To Beauty To Weirdness To Tragedy. The Caravan Keeps Moving On, And The Job Of The Longform Writer Or Filmmaker Or Radio Broadcaster Is To Stop - Is To Pause - And When The Caravan Goes Away, That's When This Stuff Comes.

The One Thing I'm Quite Critical Of Hillary Clinton For, And It Obviously Hurt Her, Is That At Some Level, The Clintons Had To Know That She Was Going To Run For President. Why Did They Feel It Necessary To Make Tens Of Millions Of Dollars With Speaking Engagements? They Must Have Known That It Would Look Grotesque. The Word For It Is "buckraking." It's Beyond Me. I Don't Understand It.

Vladimir Putin Wants Practical Things, Like The End Of Economic Sanctions, But He Also Wants Far Greater Sway In Europe And In The Overall Ideological Trends Of The World.

The Only Reason The Word "brand" Gets A Little Tiresome Is That Something That Is Complex And Wonderful And Deep Begins To Sound Like A Can Of Tomato Soup. I Recoil At That, But I'm Used To It. I Know What It Means: It Means That The New Yorker Is Not Merely The Magazine That Comes Out In Print Once A Week. It's The Web Site, It's The Festival, It's Our Mobile Application - All These Things - And What They Stand For And What They Mean.