For Khan and her colleagues at the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank based in Washington, D.C., monopoly power includes all of that. But it goes further. Even when monopolies appear to benefit consumers by offering free services or low prices, Khan contends that they can still be deeply harmful. Among the group’s frequent targets are some of the most popular companies in America: Google, Facebook, and the one to which Khan has committed much of her published work, Amazon. She tells a comprehensive story about how these companies make Americans less free, a story that recently received a surprising addendum: Last year, monopoly power cost Khan a month’s pay.

I met Khan on a Friday morning last fall at the Shops at Columbus Circle, a glitzy mall at the southwest corner of Central Park that now contains not one but two Amazon properties. On the third floor is an Amazon Books, one of more than a dozen brick-and-mortar bookstores the company has opened since 2015. It’s inspired less by libraries than by Apple stores: paperbacks and Kindles side by side on pale, sparse shelves. And in the basement is a sprawling Whole Foods—Amazon acquired the grocery chain for $13.7 billion last year—its crowded aisles lined with craft beer, foreign yogurts, and kohlrabi.

Khan is unassuming in person, with a narrow face and unruly black hair. She arrived at Amazon Books wearing the uniform of the young, urban professional class: black jeans, an oversize green flannel shirt, a cycling-inspired backpack. (Full disclosure: I was wearing almost exactly the same outfit.) She arrived very slightly late and immediately apologized. She might be a little slow, she said: She was getting married in a week, her entire family was in town, and it had already been a ludicrously busy month. But I couldn’t detect any sluggishness. A minute later, she was reeling off paragraph-length digressions on the history of Amazon’s business and the nature of its monopoly power.

“There’s a whole line of critique about Amazon that’s culture-based, about how they’re wrecking the experience of bookstores,” Khan told me as we surveyed Neil deGrasse Tyson’s latest tome. “I personally am less focused on that element.”

Instead, she argues that Amazon has denuded America’s book-buying landscape in other ways. “Amazon has massively—and I’m trying not to use this particular word, but I can’t not use it here—disrupted the business model in publishing,” she told me. “Publishers used to be able to take risks with heavier books that might not be as popular, and they used to be able to subsidize them with best sellers.” But Amazon’s demand for discounts has made it harder to cross-subsidize this way, leading to consolidation among book publishers and reduced diversity.

This is a typically Khanian analysis. In her telling, monopolies don’t just exploit consumers and workers in their part of the economy. Even when they offer low prices to consumers, their influence propagates through the entire system. If one part of an industry consolidates, then all the other parts of the industry will feel pressure to consolidate too.