George Packer's Blog, page 101

Freddy Adu and the Children of the Beautiful Game

Back in 2004, in the eighth week of the Major League Soccer season, D.C. United played the Los Angeles Galaxy. The game itself was not particularly important, but many fans in the stadium were hoping to catch a glimpse of D.C. United’s rookie midfielder, Freddy Adu, who was already being touted as the savior of American soccer.

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The Dehumanizing Sexism of the Harvard Men’s Soccer Team’s “Scouting Report”
The Next Great American Soccer Star?
Scenes from the Copa América Championship

Why Would Jeff Sessions Hide His Talks with Sergey Kislyak?

In the first weeks of the Obama Administration, Michael McFaul, the President’s top aide on Russia policy at the National Security Council, found himself in a contentious negotiation with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador to the United States. McFaul, a political scientist at Stanford who focussed on democracy promotion, was in his first government job. Kislyak, who is thirteen years older, was one of Russia’s most experienced diplomats. “He expected that I was going to be this neocon hawk on Russia,” McFaul told me. “And so he had his dukes up. He was ready for a fight.”

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“This Is the Future That Liberals Want” Is the Joke That Liberals Need
Daily Cartoon: Friday, March 3rd
Can This Democrat Win the Georgia Sixth?

Can This Democrat Win the Georgia Sixth?

Last Saturday, Jon Ossoff, a tall, skinny, thirty-year-old candidate for the U.S. Congress with Kennedy-ish features and a deliberate, Obama-like manner of speaking, was scheduled to knock on doors in Roswell, a city in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District. Over the past three decades, the district has been represented by Newt Gingrich, current Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson, and Tom Price, the new Secretary of Health and Human Services. Price’s appointment to the Cabinet left the seat empty, and a special election to fill it will be held on April 18th. The Sixth encompasses many of Atlanta’s wealthy and mostly white northern suburbs, and has long been considered a Republican lock; in 2012, Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama by twenty-four points in the district. But in the most recent election Donald Trump edged Hillary Clinton by just a single point here. Ossoff thinks he can turn the sixth blue, and claim the first congressional win against Trump on the G.O.P.’s own turf.

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Related:
Why Would Jeff Sessions Hide His Talks with Sergey Kislyak?
“This Is the Future That Liberals Want” Is the Joke That Liberals Need
Is Wall Street Responsible for Our Economic Problems?

The Not-So-Celebratory Reaction to Snap’s I.P.O. in Its Home Town

I have a funny memento of the Snap, Inc., C.E.O., Evan Spiegel: a six-inch-high bright-pink-tufted truffula tree—you know, the precious resource exploited to near-extinction by the Once-ler in Dr. Seuss’s environmental catastrophe parable “The Lorax”—which sits on the shelf in my son’s room. I bought it three years ago from an artisan on the Venice Beach boardwalk, while taking a walk with Spiegel. We met at his office, on Market Street. He wore a sleek gray suit in the sun, cutting through the exercisers and recreators like a hot knife; we talked, off the record, about letterpress printing and the parties he threw as a teen-ager. He stopped to chat with a few people he knew or who knew him—his old trainer, someone from his high school—and showed me the ramshackle blue house (the former MTV beach house) that was Snapchat’s original office. For Spiegel, who grew up in the Los Angeles neighborhood of the Pacific Palisades and was still living at his father’s house there when I met him, being in the flow of the boardwalk’s heavy foot traffic was good for product development. He told USA Today, “We can come out and talk to Snapchatters all year along, and that’s really important.” At just twenty-three, Spiegel had already turned down a three-billion-dollar acquisition offer from Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, causing Forbes to write that he was “the brashest tech wunderkind since, well, Zuckerberg.”

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An Australian Children’s-Book Author’s U.S. Customs Ordeal
The Messaging of Trump Hotels
Mar-a-Lago’s Destiny as Trump’s Presidential Retreat

Is Wall Street Responsible for Our Economic Problems?

When I met Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Columbia University and the author of “The End of Poverty,” for coffee recently, he was stubbornly holding on to a sense of optimism in spite of a discouraging turn in world events. Sachs served as an adviser to Bernie Sanders during his Presidential campaign, and has published a new book, “Building the New American Economy,” in which he presents the policy ideas that likely would have animated a Sanders Presidency—ideas that feel almost inconceivable in the current political climate.

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Related:
Why Would Jeff Sessions Hide His Talks with Sergey Kislyak?
“This Is the Future That Liberals Want” Is the Joke That Liberals Need
Can This Democrat Win the Georgia Sixth?

Sessions Revelations Leave Donald Trump in Another Fine Russian Mess

With President Trump being uncharacteristically quiet on Thursday morning amid a new batch of reports about his associates’ ties to Russia, it was left to the Kremlin to blast the “fake news” media. “The only piece of advice that I can give is that, in a situation like this, avoid reacting to all such anonymous, baseless fake news stories and rely only on official statements by genuine officials,” Dmitri Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, said, in Moscow.

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Alaska’s Pebble Mine and the Legend of Trump’s Gold
Putin Demands Sessions Resign from Russian Government
After Sessions: Where the Russia Investigation Goes Now

After Sessions: Where the Russia Investigation Goes Now

At dawn on Thursday, in a sign that all the gears of Washington’s scandal machinery were lurching into motion, MSNBC alerted viewers that its cameras were poised to capture images of the U.S. Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, on his way to work. When Sessions appeared, he gave a tight smile and repeated, with little variation, a statement that he had issued overnight: “I have not met with any Russians at any time to discuss any political campaign. And those remarks are unbelievable to me and are false.” Asked if he would recuse himself from the growing investigation into Russian efforts to help Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign, Sessions gave only a general reply: “I have said that whenever it’s appropriate, I will recuse myself.”

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Related:
Alaska’s Pebble Mine and the Legend of Trump’s Gold
Putin Demands Sessions Resign from Russian Government
Sessions Revelations Leave Donald Trump in Another Fine Russian Mess

The Not-So-Surprising Survival of Foursquare

In 2010, when Ariela Ross seized the mayorship of Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque on Foursquare—a smartphone app that allows users to broadcast their location to followers with a tap on the screen, known as a “check-in”—the company was eighteen months old. Foursquare had a practical application: making it easier for friends to find one another. But the real hook for its devotees was its virtual merit badges, mayorships (awarded to the user who checked in the most at any given location), and leaderboards. Dennis Crowley, who co-founded Foursquare after his earlier location app, Dodgeball, was purchased by Google and quickly foundered, had a hunch that transplanting the reward system of videogames into the real world would give his new venture more stickiness. He was right. Bodegas, bars, dorms, and even street corners quickly became the scenes of pitched battles for mayoral supremacy. Before long, Foursquare was being compared to platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Crowley and his co-founder, Naveen Selvadurai, appeared in a Gap campaign.

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A Perfect Storm at Uber
Welcome to Facebook TV
The Tech Resistance to the Trump Refugee Ban

Trump’s Speech to Congress Was Not “Normal”

In Donald Trump’s America, “normal” is a word that invites nostalgia. It was so rarely heard during Trump’s chaotic first month in office that, on Monday, the Times posed the following question to a panel of political scientists, law professors, and former government officials: “Just how abnormal is the Trump presidency?” But on Tuesday night, after Trump addressed a joint session of Congress, normalcy was breaking out all over. The writer Max Boot, a critic of Trump, commented on Twitter that the address was the “first ‘normal’ speech Trump has given & therefore best.” Brian Williams, on MSNBC, called it Trump’s “most speech-like speech.” The Washington Post, on a similar, circular note, pronounced the President’s address “surprisingly presidential”—which is, when you think about it, like calling an athlete’s performance “surprisingly athletic.”

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A Vichy Scholar Held in Houston
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, March 1st
Watching Melania Trump at Congress’s Joint Session

Watching Melania Trump at Congress’s Joint Session

Prior to last night’s joint session of Congress, at which President Donald Trump delivered his first formal address to legislators, there was much anticipation of what gestures, symbolic or otherwise, the Democrats would make to register their antipathy for the President and their repudiation of the positions and policies he has sought to enact in the past six weeks. Would they shun the President as he glad-handed the aisle? Sit on their hands as he spoke? Jeer? Or would the respect customarily due to the office be extended to the office-holder, even one who has bragged, lied, insulted, and abused his way to the highest position in the nation?

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Trump’s Speech to Congress Was Not “Normal”
A Vichy Scholar Held in Houston
Donald Trump Writes an “S.N.L.” Episode