GEOGRAPHY IN THE NEWS:

A new book about the impact of Amazon on American geography was recently reviewed in The Atlantic: "There are countless ways to measure Amazon’s hold on American life. More people in the U.S. subscribe to its Prime service than voted for either Donald Trump or Joe Biden in the past election: more than 100 million, by recent estimates. Amazon reaps fully half of what people in this country spend online. It is the second-biggest private workplace in the United States, after Walmart, employing more than 800,000 people, most of whom will never set foot in the Seattle headquarters’ plant spheres. Among Amazon’s large Arizona-based workforce, most of it inside warehouses, one in three people was on the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in 2017. ... The rise of the internet in the 2000s accelerated the process in ways we’re by now familiar with, and a handful of companies—Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, in particular—came to dominate large swaths of economic life. What [author Alec] MacGillis feels is underappreciated is the geographical remapping of wealth—and, with it, power—that the transformation has brought about."
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/alec-macgillis-fulfillment-amazon/617796/