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.

I left Gorbachev's office thinking that everything about him was outsized: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness.

I understand the difference between journalism and scholarship that comes 20 years later.

I don't know that Donald Trump is anything more to Putin than what Lenin called a poleznye durak, a useful idiot.

Disaster can take a nation by surprise, slowly, and then all at once.

We begin to inhabit oppositional and rarely intersecting mental universes having to do with ideology and fact and non-fact and news and non-news.

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.