Credit: Philip Montgomery
Coming on March 16, 2021...
FULFILLMENT: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, a sweeping narrative of regional inequality in America, captured through the frame of Amazon.
“A wide-ranging, impressionistic tour of a nation whose citizens’ existence has become intertwined with a single corporation . . . MacGillis was one of the first journalists to begin documenting the socioeconomic upheaval that helped shift the rural Rust Belt from blue to red . . . [He] describes how, while rich corporations and their top employees have settled in a small number of wealthy coastal cities, the rest of the American landscape has been leached of opportunities.”
“A grounded and expansive examination of the American economic divide . . . This is much more than a story of retail. It’s about real estate. It’s about lobbying, data centers and the CIA. It’s about revolving doors in Washington, D.C., and cardboard folders in Ohio . . . [Fulfillment] is neither a hagiography nor a targeted attack. Instead, like the HBO series The Wire, it reveals the way economic, political and social systems affect individual stories . . . It takes a skillful journalist to weave data and anecdotes together so effectively . . . Reading these people’s stories will break your heart. But you should read them.”
“MacGillis has set out to do something different. The Amazon depicted in Fulfillment is both a cause and a metaphor. It’s an actual engine behind the regional inequality that has made parts of the United States 'incomprehensible to one another,' he writes, stymieing a sense of national solidarity . . . The result is galloping prosperity for some Americans and unrelenting precarity for others . . . MacGillis suggests that one-click satisfactions distract us from taking in the bigger picture, whose contours can only be discerned with a patient and immersive approach.”
“Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote that all work has dignity if it pays an adequate wage. Alec MacGillis explains why some of America’s richest people and largest corporations don’t seem to care. He has an uncanny ability to weave together the stories of those whose fortunes are soaring with the stories of those whose lives are falling into hopelessness.”
—Sherrod Brown, U.S. Senator from Ohio and author of Desk 88
“Alec MacGillis is one of the very best reporters in America. By always going his own way, he finds stories and truths that others avoid. Fulfillment paints a devastating picture of Amazon, but it also gives human voices to the larger story of our unequal economy and society. Fulfillment is an essential book in the literature of America’s self-destruction.”
—George Packer, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of Our Man and the National Book Award–winning The Unwinding
“Fulfillment vividly details the devastating costs of Amazon’s dominance and brutal business practices, showcasing an economy that has concentrated in private hands staggering wealth and power while impoverishing workers, crushing independent business, and supplanting public governance with private might. A critical read.”
—Lina Khan, associate professor at Columbia Law School and author of Amazon's Antitrust Paradox
Featured Articles
Amazon and the Breaking of Baltimore
Regional inequality has deepened across the country.
March 9, 2021
Inside the Capitol Riot: What the Parler Videos Reveal
The trove of more than 500 videos recovered from a largely pro-Trump social platform provides a uniquely immersive account of the violence and confusion as seen from inside the insurrection.
January 17, 2021
The True Cost of Dollar Stores
Discount chains are thriving. But what do they do to poor communities?
June 29, 2020
The Tragedy of Baltimore
Since Freddie Gray’s death in 2015, violent crime has spiked to levels unseen for a quarter century. Inside the crackup of an American city.
March 12, 2019
Why Do Americans Stay When Their Town Has No Future?
Family and community are the only things left in Adams County, Ohio, as the coal-fired power plants abandon ship and the government shrugs.
May 23, 2018
Book Review: The Ordeal of Appalachia
A new account challenges our notion of how the people of Appalachia “acquired civilization and then lost it.”
October 30, 2017
The Last Shot
Amid a surging opiate crisis, the maker of the anti-addiction drug Vivitrol skirted the usual sales channels. It found a captive market for its once-a-month injection in the criminal justice system.
June 17, 2017
Revenge of the Forgotten Class
Hillary Clinton and the Democrats were playing with fire when they effectively wrote off white workers in the small towns and cities of the Rust Belt.
November 10, 2016
The Great Republican Crack-Up
Dayton was once a bastion of the GOP establishment. The story of how the city changed helps explain the rise of Donald Trump.
July 15, 2016
The Third Rail
In Baltimore, public investment — and disinvestment — in transportation have figured greatly in the persistence of racial and economic inequality.
March, 2016
The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker
A journey through the poisonous, racially divided world that produced a Republican star
June 15, 2014
The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers
In Hobbs, New Mexico, the high school closed and football was cancelled, while just across the state line in Texas, students seemed to be living nearly normal lives. Here’s how pandemic school closures exact their emotional toll on young people.
March 8, 2021
The Students Left Behind by Remote Learning
The desire to protect children may put their long-term well-being at stake.
September 28, 2020
The Case Against Boeing
Since Samya Stumo’s death in a 737 MAX crash, her parents and her great-uncle, Ralph Nader, have devoted themselves to proving that the company put profit over safety.
November 11, 2019
Why the Perfect Red-State Democrat Lost
Taylor Sappington is exactly the kind of candidate his party should want in Ohio. But he couldn’t get union support.
November 16, 2018
How Liberty University Built a Billion-Dollar Empire Online
With a hard sell to prospective students and huge amounts in taxpayer funding, Jerry Falwell Jr. transformed the evangelical institution into a behemoth.
April 17, 2018
Is Anybody Home at HUD?
A long-harbored conservative dream — the “dismantling of the administrative state” — is taking place under Secretary Ben Carson.
August 21, 2017
Jared Kushner’s Other Real Estate Empire in Baltimore
May 23, 2017
The Original Underclass
Poor white Americans’ current crisis shouldn’t have caught the rest of the country as off guard as it has.
September 2016
The Billionaire's Loophole
A tax law helps David Rubenstein perform major patriotic philanthropic works. Is it fair?
March 14, 2016
Who Turned My Blue State Red?
IT is one of the central political puzzles of our time: Parts of the country that depend on the safety-net programs supported by Democrats are increasingly voting for Republicans who favor shredding that net.
November 20, 2015
Scandal at Clinton Inc.
How Doug Band drove a wedge through a political dynasty
September 22, 2013
About Alec
Alec MacGillis is a reporter for ProPublica and the author of Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America and The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell. In recent years, his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York, and New York Times Magazine, among other publications, on subjects including Jared Kushner's apartment complexes in Baltimore, violence in dollar stores, and the effects of remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic. He won the 2016 Robin Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, the 2017 Polk Award for National Reporting, and the 2017 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award.
Alec was born and raised in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he graduated from Pittsfield High School before attending Yale. He started his career at a series of small newspapers: The Winsted Journal (Conn.), Journal Inquirer (Conn.), Brooklyn Papers (N.Y.), and Concord Monitor (N.H.) before arriving at the Baltimore Sun in 2000. In 2006, he joined the Washington Post, where he covered the 2008 presidential campaign and the Obama administration before leaving for the New Republic in 2011. In 2010-11, he received a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan.
In addition to his print journalism, Alec served as the narrator for a 2018 PBS Frontline documentary on left-behind cities, based in Dayton, Ohio, and his reporting on Kushnerville served as the basis for an episode of Netflix's Dirty Money in 2019, “Slumlord Millionaire.”