40% of everything sold online in the United States is through Amazon. Its web services division owns almost a third of the worldwide cloud infrastructure.
Amazon is a goliath.
Dana Mattioli is an investigative journalist at the Wall Street Journal and the author of “The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power.” Mary Long caught up with Mattioli for a conversation about:
- Amazon’s early days and how it withstood years of sustained losses.
- How Amazon makes Wall Street look genteel.
- The lengths that the company went to get information from competitors.
The woman who's beaten the odds to fulfil her childhood astronaut dream. Also: a photography camp for children in Belize; and Moo Deng, the viral baby pygmy hippo.
Our weekly collection of happy stories and positive news.
Ukraine has been asking for permission to use Western-supplied long-range missiles to strike deep within Russian territory. The Biden administration has not given Ukraine the green light on that — we'll look at what that means in this protracted conflict. Also, it's been a year since a massive and coordinated United Auto Workers Strike secured better pay for workers - but a year on, workers are worried about job security. Plus, a new era in space tourism, with a civilian taking a space walk. He didn't have any NASA astronaut training, but we'll tell you what he DID have.
Bring your picnic blankets, dancing shoes and some snacks because summer isn’t over yet! If you’re looking for one last free Chicago summer celebration before fall comes around the corner, take yourself and some friends to the Vocalo Summer Finale at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion on Friday, Sept. 20. The concert will feature performances by Chicago-bred and loved artists like DJ Lady D, KAINA, Pivot Gang and Marquis Hill. Reset checks in with Vocalo and Hill to learn more.
For a full archive of Reset interviews, head over to wbez.org/reset.
Developing Asia has been the site of some of the last century's fastest growing economies as well as some of the world's most durable authoritarian regimes. Many accounts of rapid growth alongside monopolies on political power have focused on crony relationships between the state and business. But these relationships have not always been smooth, as anti-corruption campaigns, financial and banking crises, and dramatic bouts of liberalization and crackdown demonstrate. Why do partnerships between political and business elites fall apart over time? And why do some partnerships produce stable growth and others produce crisis or stagnation?
In Precarious Ties: Business and the State in Authoritarian Asia(Oxford UP, 2023) (Oxford, 2023), Meg Rithmire offers a novel account of the relationships between business and political elites in three authoritarian regimes in developing Asia: Indonesia under Suharto's New Order, Malaysia under the Barisan Nasional, and China under the Chinese Communist Party. All three regimes enjoyed periods of high growth and supposed alliances between autocrats and capitalists. Over time, however, the relationships between capitalists and political elites changed, and economic outcomes diverged. While state-business ties in Indonesia and China created dangerous dynamics like capital flight, fraud, and financial crisis, Malaysia's state-business ties contributed to economic stagnation.
To understand these developments, Rithmire, a professor at Harvard Business School, presents two conceptual models of state-business relations that explain their genesis and why variation occurs over time. She shows that mutual alignment occurs when an authoritarian regime organizes its institutions, or even its informal practices, to induce capitalists to invest in growth and development. Mutual endangerment, on the other hand, obtains when economic and political elites are entangled in corrupt dealings and invested in perpetuating each other's dominance. The loss of power on one side would bring about the demise of the other. Rithmire contends that the main factors explaining why one pattern dominates over the other are trust between business and political elites, determined during regime formation, and the dynamics of financial liberalization. Empirically rich and sweeping in scope, Precarious Ties offers lessons for all nations in which the state and the private sector are deeply entwined.
Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco. His research examines the political economy of governance and development in China.
2024 is on track to be the biggest year for public stadium subsidies we’ve ever seen. Billionaire team owners keep asking for—and receiving—more exorbitant arenas and upgrades from local governments. But who’s footing the bill? The taxpayers! Even though most economists say the returns from these facilities never live up to the hype, city officials continue to court teams and kowtow to their demands. Why do teams like the Raiders, Orioles and Penguins have local governments in such an expensive chokehold? What does a stadium actually do for a community? What happens when voters have a say? Erin and Tre’vell break down how we got here, and explain why getting a new stadium in your neighborhood is no slam dunk.
We're going beyond the initial headlines and polls to break down the good, bad, and ugly from Tuesday night's high-stakes presidential debate (and whether it'll actually matter in November).
You'll hear analysis from guests on both sides of the aisle:
First, Beth Silvers and Sarah Stewart Holland from the Pantsuit Politics podcast offer insights and perspective from the Democrats' side.
Then, Republican strategist and senior CNN political commentator Scott Jennings gives his analysis.
Join us again for our 10-minute daily news roundups every Mon-Fri!
Republicans from Ohio to Arkansas, from South Dakota to Florida and from Nebraska to Missouri have been throwing everything at trying to keep abortion ballot measures from actually reaching voters. In this week’s Amicus - a deep look at efforts to stifle and chill direct democracy in the states, post Dobbs. Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Jessica Valenti, the author of Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win, and Lauren Brenzel, the campaign director for Yes on 4 in Florida, about the playbook that’s being used to threaten ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights in states around the nation.
Want more Amicus? Subscribe to Slate Plus to immediately unlock exclusive SCOTUS analysis and weekly extended episodes. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen.
In evaluating the potential outcomes of the expansion of AI, the natural tendency is to downplay the benefits and highlight the risks. Oprah Winfrey recently jumped into the conversation. Jennifer Huddleston comments.
