Amazon

Friday

Lloyd Evans

My new job at the Amazon packing factory

What will you do if it all goes wrong? I have a back-up plan: working for Amazon. Its Luton warehouse offers tours to the public, and I went along to see what my future may hold. The vast hangar sits in a field of mega-sheds near the M25, where built-up London peters out into scrub and green farmland. I arrived at a bright-yellow security gate where I was greeted by Amin and Sophie, who seemed thrilled to welcome our party. Six in all. Sophie asked us – or perhaps ordered us – to deposit our phones in a locker whose key she retained during our visit. Amin explained the rules. Follow me. Walk within the blue lines. Ascend staircases on the left. Use the handrail. Off we went.

Tuesday

Lloyd Evans

My new job at the Amazon packing factory

What will you do if it all goes wrong? I have a back-up plan. Working for Amazon. Its Luton warehouse offers tours to the public, and I went along to see what my future may hold. The vast hangar sits in a field of mega-sheds near the M25 where built-up London peters out into scrub and green farmland. I arrived at a bright-yellow security gate where I was greeted by Amin and Sophie who seemed thrilled to welcome our party. Six in all. Sophie asked us – or perhaps ordered us – to deposit our phones in a locker whose key she retained during our visit. Amin explained the rules. Follow me. Walk within the blue lines. Ascend staircases on the left. Use the handrail. Off we went.

Richard M. Reinsch II

Is ‘eating the tariffs’ good for business?

When President Trump told Walmart to “EAT THE TARIFFS,” he implied that to not do so was a profit-mongering conspiracy against the American people. He noted Walmart’s extensive trade relationships with China and its large profit margin. But Walmart maintained that tariffs made price rises unavoidable. And when Amazon flirted with noting on some of its products the precise amount of cost increases attributable to tariffs, Trump called Jeff Bezos to complain and Amazon backed away from its plan. After observing Trump’s hostility to Walmart and Amazon, Home Depot took a different approach and asked: what trade war? Unlike numerous major American corporations, Home Depot has not rescinded its 2025 guidance for investors because of the uncertainty from tariffs.

Tuesday

Christopher Webb

Will robots simply bore us to extinction?

A few years ago, when ChatGPT and Claude were beginning to take off, some tech leaders seemed to develop a curious interest in oceanography. Consider, for instance, the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s suggestion in 2023 that AI ought to be compared to a ‘tidal wave’; or Mustafa Suleyman’s book on AI, The Coming Wave (2024), in which the DeepMind co-founder talks urgently about an ‘impending deluge’ (while repeatedly warning us that the ‘wave is coming’, and, even more alarmingly, ‘the coming wave really is coming’). It didn’t take long for the analogy to spread. The IMF’s Kristalina Georgieva would liken the technology to a ‘tsunami hitting the labour market’.

Friday

David Whitehouse

Will the New Glenn explosion put America behind China in the Moon race?

Last Thursday's explosion of the New Glenn rocket, on its launch pad during a test, could hardly be worse news for America’s return to the Moon. Just two days earlier, NASA had unveiled its plans for a Moon Base, which relied heavily on Jeff Bezos’s rocket and his Blue Origin series of lunar landers. As investigators, safety and clean-up crews inspect the wreckage, NASA will be contemplating a major rethink. The options aren’t good. Explosions on the pad are among the worst things that can happen because of how long repairs can take. If a rocket is to explode, engineers pray that it takes place in the air.

new glenn
melania trump
Kara Kennedy

Melania Trump is phoning it in

There’s something admirable about Melania Trump’s commitment to doing absolutely nothing. While America obsesses over her husband’s latest provocations, the First Lady has opted for absence – and turned it into a pretty lucrative enterprise. Consider this month’s rare emergence from her self-imposed exile. As rumors swirled that Donald’s vendetta against Harvard stemmed from the university rejecting their son Barron, Melania was finally compelled to issue a public statement. The denial was characteristically terse: Barron never applied to Harvard, and all such assertions are “completely false.

Tuesday

Anna Aslanyan

How the 18th-century Panopticon inspired today’s giant distribution hubs

From our UK edition

The future of work is increasingly on our minds. Now that AI is coming for our jobs, will we end up supervising or being supervised by it? One way of spending the time freed up by smart tech is to read Control Science, an economic history showing how work rules were established and have since come to dominate our lives. The book’s timeline covers the past 400 years, its settings ranging across the world from North America to Europe to Japan and back to the US. A historian of labour, Henry Snow dissects four entrenched ideas: that society is a mere collection of individuals; that they are solely driven by selfishness; that they are therefore incapable of self-administered planning; and that ‘everything is – and should be – a market’.

Thursday

Tina Brown

How Jeff Bezos destroyed the Washington Post

The debacle of the Washington Post’s hara-kiri last week dispatched the myth that a tech billionaire could save journalism. Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the paper in 2013 was greeted with euphoria, not just because he was a big fat wallet who would absorb the losses, but because we thought his Amazon wizardry was transferable to journalism’s battered business model. The man was a digital titan, for God’s sake. He started selling books online from his garage and built it into a $2.2 trillion consumer nirvana, with a Blue Origin side hustle of suborbital rockets. Surely he would figure out innovative new ways to bring the Post’s rigorous reporting to hungry new audiences?

Monday

Neal Pollack

Melania the movie will send Bluesky ballistic

As America stayed inside at the weekend, terrified and frozen, the White House hosted its own movie night: the first-ever screening of Melania, an insider-access documentary about the First Lady, directed by the disgraced Brett Ratner. This film that old-school Hollywood wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole is coming to theaters everywhere on Friday, whether you see it or not. The Hollywood Reporter, which met the devil at a crossroads in exchange for access, posted exclusive photos of the event, which included “black-tied VIPs, monogrammed popcorn tubs and a military band playing movie tunes”, as well as bespoke black-and-white cookies bearing Melania’s name. The band actually played “Melania’s Waltz,” a special composition for the film.

Trump melania

Friday

Alexander Larman

Is Jacob Elordi too tall to play James Bond?

The casting of the new James Bond is the biggest story in Hollywood at the moment. The sheer amount of disinformation and exaggeration that has accompanied snippets of news about the production of a new 007 adventure is remarkable, even by the standards of La La Land. Ever since the Bond franchise was purchased by Amazon, taken out of the restrictive hands of Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, and placed in the care of Amy Pascal and David Heyman, the question of who’s doing what has been a source of fascination. The hiring of Dune’s Denis Villeneuve to direct was broadly seen as a smart, auteur-ish move; the decision to entrust the script to Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight, who has written an awful lot of bad films and television series, less so.

Wednesday

Ross Clark

Has the AI jobs bloodbath finally arrived?

There has been much wallowing over news that Amazon and UPS have each just cut 14,000 jobs. Some Amazon employees report of being fired with all the heartlessness you might expect in a world where tech has taken over: by automated email. Maybe it was even AI which handpicked them to be de-emphasized, to use that dreaded 1990s expression. This, then, seems to be the future: where an elite of AI entrepreneurs grow rich while the rest of us slop off into idleness and unemployment. So much for those who have been gleefully predicting the implosion of the AI boom. Nvidia has just been revealed to be the world’s first $5 trillion company, with a market capitalization greater than the whole of Germany.

ai artificial intelligence

Sunday

Ben Clerkin

Is Jack Carr behind the Department of War?

As a Navy SEAL for 20 years, who reached the rank of Lieutenant Commander and served in Iraq and Afghanistan, Jack Carr knows about warfare on an expert and visceral level. And as the New York Times bestselling author of The Terminal List series and writer of the Amazon hit show based on the books, starring Chris Pratt, he knows the power of words. He also has a tendency to succeed at whatever he turns his mind to (see the above). But, still, when he decided the Department of Defense should be renamed the Department of War, it seemed like a very tall order and he was a lone voice. Undeterred, he wrote in op-eds about how the department had lost its way and needed to refocus on warfighting by changing its name back to that it was given in 1789.

Jack Carr

Saturday

Art Edwards

What’s happened to the trade paperback?

What’s happened to the trade paperback? To my thinking, it provides the most pleasurable reading experience in the world. And yet it’s virtually disappeared. Trade paperbacks are the paperback versions that became ubiquitous during the latter half of the 20th century. They’re typically larger than mass market paperbacks and publishers print them on nicer paper. There’s also something amenable about the way a trade paperback’s covers give that makes for an optimal reading experience. It’s not like my world falls apart if I have to read a hardcover – which would surely happen if I ever had to read an ebook – but I can avoid a book for a long time if it means I’ll eventually wind up with the trade paperback version to read. Hardbacks strike me as unforgiving.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

Why Venice deserves Jeff Bezos’s wedding

From our UK edition

13 min listen

Jeff Bezos is getting married in Venice – but not everyone is celebrating. Venetians have staged small protests, accusing the billionaire of symbolising the city’s takeover by the ultra-rich. But is this anything new? Associate editor Owen Matthews joins Freddy Gray to discuss.

Tuesday

Cockburn

A White House Correspondents’ Dinner hangover

By now, you have surely got a flavor of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and all the accompanying parties that took place over the weekend. After all, the DC media has nothing to talk about other than itself. The President long ago chose not to attend, and that the intimation was that members of his administration should skip the “MSM” events too. There were fewer celebrities than ever – not least because the White House Correspondents’ Association got rid of the comedian who was set to provide the entertainment. The gargantuan TIME after-party – your correspondent saw the entry tally at over 2,470 when he arrived at 11:30 – smelled like feet due to the Raclette on the rear terrace.

white house

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: Leave our soldiers alone

From our UK edition

Military farce Sir: Your leading article (‘The age of realism’, 1 March) argues that the government must invest in the UK’s ‘thinned-out infantry ranks’. This is certainly true, but it does pass over, in my view, the more fundamental issue of the broken recruitment system. My own application to join the Royal Air Force was rejected on the basis that my mother is Polish. Given that Poland is an ally, this seems a curious justification for disqualification. I was born and educated in London, my mother having moved to the UK with my English father 30 years ago. Clearly I am not a security threat, but because ‘computer says no’, I will never be able to enlist. It is, then, with amusement and some frustration that I often read of the ‘recruitment crisis’.

Thursday

Madeline Grant

Make Bond great again

From our UK edition

One of the great recurring James Bond tropes is to make it look as though 007 has actually been killed before the film’s title credits. You Only Live Twice, From Russia with Love and Skyfall all begin with Bond in a position where his demise seems inevitable. Of course, he always turns up alive. (Quite what the rest of the film would consist of if he didn’t is anyone’s guess: perhaps Moneypenny dealing with probate or M arranging one of those ghastly direct cremations.) Now, however, we may have reached a danger from which even Bond cannot wriggle out. Amazon, the company responsible for one of the biggest flops in TV adaptation history, the Middle-earth prequel series The Rings of Power, has paid more than $1 billion to take ‘creative control’ of the Bond franchise.

Tuesday

Neal Pollack

The economic blackout movement trying to stop capitalism in its tracks

For weeks, I’ve been seeing calls for a February 28 “economic blackout” spread across my social-media feed like dandelion tufts in the wind. From midnight on February 27 to the following midnight, anyone participating in the blackout should avoid spending money at Amazon, Walmart or Best Buy. Do not buy fast food or gas, says “the People’s Union,” which is organizing the blackout. Don’t shop at major retailers. If you have to shop, make it only for essentials, like food to feed your kids, and emergency supplies, and only do it at small, local businesses. It’s possible I could participate in the blackout by accident, but I wouldn’t ever do something like this willingly. Obviously, I’m not the target audience.

oligarchy tech capitalist pigs

Monday

Stephen L. Miller

The shockingly earnest anti-comeback of Tom Green

If you grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s as a Generation Xer, you either loved or hated Tom Green. You saw him as either some pioneering prankster and innovator of the cable-news troll or an obnoxious man-child desperate for attention. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, but Green’s influence on internet culture and podcasts such as Joe Rogan’s is undeniable. But then one day it just felt like he went away, much in the same way Dave Chappelle did. And just as online streaming platforms such as Netflix threw a ton of money at Chappelle, Amazon has now done the same with Tom Green. This doesn’t, however, feel like a Tom Green comeback.

Friday

Georgia Heneage

Why we dramatize history — and why we should stop

A few weeks ago, a friend asked if I had watched the Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. That interview, yes — the one with all the sweating and the pizza in Woking, in which he definitely didn’t meet Virginia Roberts Giuffre but he did single-handedly crash his reputation, and Emily Maitlis, like the Medusa of journalism she has since become, just let him tie his own noose. Of course I’ve watched it. I’m a journalist. And a twenty-first-century citizen. Who hasn’t? My friend, for one, though she pointed out that she can just watch the three-part Amazon dramatization of the whole affair, A Very Royal Scandal, which is even juicier than the interview. (“I’m the son of the sovereign,” bellows the Duke of York, played by a soapy Michael Sheen.

history