You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

When the federal government started withholding income taxes from workers’ paychecks during World War II, the innovation was presented as a matter of fairness, a way to ensure that everyone paid. Irving Berlin wrote a song for the Treasury Department: “You see those bombers in the sky? Rockefeller helped to build them. So did I.”

The withholding system remains the cornerstone of income taxation, effectively preventing Americans from lying about wage income. Employers submit an annual W-2 report on the wages paid to each worker, making it hard to fudge the numbers.

But the burden of taxation is increasingly warped because the government has no comparable system for verifying income from businesses. The result is that most wage earners pay their fair share while many business owners engage in blatant fraud at public expense.

In a remarkable 2019 analysis, the Internal Revenue Service estimated that Americans report on their taxes less than half of all income...

You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

We were eavesdroppers, strangers reading stolen scraps of other people’s correspondence.

—The History of Hut 3 (Top Secret Ultra)

God delivers his will as visible in events, an obscure text written in a mysterious tongue. People toss off instant translations of it, hasty translations that are incorrect, full of faults, omissions and misreadings. Very few minds understand the divine tongue. The wisest, the calmest, the deepest, set about slowly deciphering it, and when they finally turn up with their text, the job has been done; there are already twenty translations in the marketplace. From each translation a party is born, and from each misreading a faction; and each party believes it has the only true text, and each faction believes it holds the light.

—VICTOR HUGO, Les Misérables

It’s been a good month for Bitcoin believers. The currency of the future — or is it the future of currency? — became legal tender in El Salvador.

Some might dismiss as a publicity stunt the embrace of a digital currency by a country where only a third of the population has internet access. Some Salvadorans took to the streets to protest. But let’s not minimize this moment. Esperanto, the language of the future, never managed to become an official language in any country.

Bitcoin, for the uninitiated, is a technology that purports to solve a host of problems with old-fashioned national currencies. It is designed to safeguard wealth against the depredations of inflation, public authorities and financial intermediaries.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Some products become popular because they’re useful. Bitcoin is popular despite being mostly useless. Its success rests on the simple fact that the value of a Bitcoin has increased dramatically since its...

It’s been a good month for Bitcoin believers. The currency of the future — or is it the future of currency? — became legal tender in El Salvador.

Some might dismiss as a publicity stunt the embrace of a digital currency by a country where only a third of the population has internet access. Some Salvadorans took to the streets to protest. But let’s not minimize this moment. Esperanto, the language of the future, never managed to become an official language in any country.

Bitcoin, for the uninitiated, is a technology that purports to solve a host of problems with old-fashioned national currencies. It is designed to safeguard wealth against the depredations of inflation, public authorities and financial intermediaries.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Some products become popular because they’re useful. Bitcoin is popular despite being mostly useless. Its success rests on the simple fact that the value of a Bitcoin has increased dramatically since its...

You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more

SEATTLE — Amazon has eclipsed Walmart to become the world’s largest retail seller outside China, according to corporate and industry data, a milestone in the shift from brick-and-mortar to online shopping that has changed how people buy everything from Teddy Grahams to teddy bears.

Propelled in part by surging demand during the pandemic, people spent more than $610 billion on Amazon over the 12 months ending in June, according to Wall Street estimates compiled by the financial research firm FactSet. Walmart on Tuesday posted sales of $566 billion for the 12 months ending in July.

Alibaba, the giant online Chinese retailer, is the world’s top seller. Neither Amazon nor Walmart is a dominant player in China.

In racing past Walmart, Amazon has dethroned one of the most successful — and feared — companies of recent decades. Walmart perfected a thriving big-box model of retailing that squeezed every possible penny out of its costs, which drove down prices and...

In the spring of 2020, Dairy Farmers of America, the nation’s largest dairy coöperative, purchased Dean Foods, the country’s largest milk processor, for four hundred and thirty-three million dollars. D.F.A. formed in 1998, out of a merger of four regional co-ops. Last year, its members, more than twelve thousand dairy farmers, sold fifty-six billion pounds of milk, about twenty-five per cent of the nation’s total, and the organization as a whole brought in nearly eighteen billion dollars in revenue. With the acquisition of Dean, D.F.A. gained unprecedented power as both a milk supplier and buyer. Pete Hardin, the editor and publisher of the dairy trade journal The Milkweed, told me, “It’s the poster child for agricultural concentration—and what Big Ag has become.”

For years, D.F.A. members and nonmembers alike have complained about the co-op’s growing market power. “The only reason I’m with D.F.A. is there’s no other place to go,” a dairy farmer from the Ozarks, who asked...