Although America’s political system seems unable to stimulate robust, sustained economic growth, it at least is stimulating consumption of a small but important segment of literature. Dystopian novels are selling briskly — Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here (1935), George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and …

  When a cloud-storage malfunction at Amazon Inc. temporarily knocked out services including Netflix, Slack, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website, “smart” thermostats and my email server, it demonstrated how much we’ve all come to depend on one company’s infrastructure. It also shows how the centralization of data has made the internet — at least the part that most of …

  “I have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to serve American victims,” President Donald Trump said in his address to Congress Tuesday night. He was referring to a very specific kind of victim — those harmed by undocumented immigrants. And his comments show that, current conventional wisdom notwithstanding, President Trump is not so different from …