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Old gatekeepers might not always have been worthy of praise, but at least there were a lot of them. And in that multiplicity there was the basis for democracy. In Amazon's vision of the future, there's just one gate. And while Jeff Bezos may wave everyone through, the health of the book business ha…

[...] let's not confuse Amazon with a utopian experiment in participatory democracy. Amazon always gives better treatment to some artifacts than others--promoting them in email, on its home page, and through its recommendation algorithms. This is tremendous cultural power, especially given how so m…

Nixon's scabrous attorney general

[...] Don Graham's grandfather, Eugene Meyer, spoke of his new duties with solemn obligation:

The newspaper's duty is to its readers and to the public at large and not to private interests of its owners. In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its materia…