The Only Reason To Be In Business

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.

I Use Social Media Every Day. I Don't Have A Twitter Account, But Not Because I'm A Dinosaur About It. I Have Enough Of A Platform Here. People In My Position Who Do It Tend To Use It In A Promotional Way Or In A Hamstrung Way. I Look At Twitter All The Time As A News Tool Or For Cultural Conversation. I've Used It In My Reporting. It's Very Useful.

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.

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.

Trump's Election Is Part Of An International Trend That's No Less Alarming, In Britain, In France, In Germany, In Austria. Vladimir Putin Wanted To See This Outcome No Less Than He Would Like To See Nationalists And Anti-europeanists Win In France.