George Packer's Blog, page 124
December 29, 2016
The Best Eleven Minutes in Sports in 2016
A professional football game has four fifteen-minute quarters, but once you subtract all the time the players spend huddling up, walking around, mugging for the cameras, getting into position, and waiting for the referees to spot the ball and the quarterback to go through his pre-snap soliloquy, you get about eleven minutes of actual game play—the throws, runs, catches, and tackles that make the sport worth watching in the first place.
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Related:Art and Us in 2016
Highlights from New Yorker Interactive and Multimedia Stories of 2016
The Most Notable Medical Findings of 2016
What “The Organization Man” Can Tell Us About Inequality Today
Eduardo Porter, a columnist for the Times, recently wrote a pessimistic piece on income inequality. Citing a soon-to-be-published book by Walter Scheidel, a Stanford history professor, Porter summed up what the headline called a “dilemma for humanity: stark inequality or total war.” While Porter didn’t fully endorse Scheidel’s thesis that violence, in history, is the only real “cure” to income inequality, he did leave his readers without much hope for narrowing America’s current income distributions by less destructive means. Coming out of the November election, we can see his point. For an election marked by resentment of the rich from seemingly all corners—of Wall Street fat cats, by Bernie Sanders supporters; of the global élite, by Donald Trump supporters; of Trump himself, by Hillary Clinton supporters—it’s hard to name a policy offered by any of those candidates that would really reduce income inequality. Higher taxes and lower out-of-pocket college costs would level disposable income, but it wouldn’t change why a hedge-fund manager makes billions while a schoolteacher makes thousands. President-elect Trump’s answers to income inequality—recut trade deals, deport criminal immigrants, make America’s economy bloom again—suffer from an even larger gap between cause and effect.
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Related:The Five Biggest Business Stories of 2016
The Long-Term Costs of Fining Juvenile Offenders
The Ten Best Business Quotes of 2016
December 28, 2016
The Obama Administration’s Final Warning on the Middle East Peace Process
The vain and bullying persona that Donald Trump projects online and in three dimensions is consistent: he is convinced that all that is required to restore the globe to a state of order and prosperity is his own good self. “The world was gloomy before I won—there was no hope,” he tweeted on the day after Christmas. “Now the market is up nearly 10% and Christmas spending is over a trillion dollars!” He is both the Prince of Peace and the savior of the Nasdaq index.
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Related:A Significant Resolution on Israel
The Sixteen Most-Read New Yorker Magazine Stories of 2016
Barack Obama’s Sanity-Affirming Press Conference
The Five Biggest Business Stories of 2016
While 2016 is a year that lots of people would like to forget, it is also a year that no one is going to have any trouble remembering. Here are five stories about business and the global economy that made a big impression.
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Related:A Significant Resolution on Israel
2016: The Year in Forty-Four New Yorker Postscripts
2016: The Year in Cartoons
December 27, 2016
A Significant Resolution on Israel
Last Friday, the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 2334, with a dramatic abstention by the Obama Administration. The resolution called on Palestinian leaders to take “immediate steps to prevent all acts of violence against civilians, including acts of terror,” and refrain from “incitement and inflammatory rhetoric.” Its real target, though, was Israel’s settlement project, which, the resolution sharply claimed, has “no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace.”
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Related:The Psychological Research That Helps Explain the Election
Year of “The Forgotten Man”
Will Putin Unite the European and American Right?
2016: The Year in Forty-Four New Yorker Postscripts
“This was not supposed to happen. Ever.”
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:The Five Biggest Business Stories of 2016
2016: The Year in Cartoons
The Best New Yorker Videos of 2016
2016: The Year in Forty-Three New Yorker Postscripts
“This was not supposed to happen. Ever.”
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:2016: The Year in Cartoons
The Best New Yorker Videos of 2016
Highlights from the Year in New Yorker Photography
December 24, 2016
The Long-Term Costs of Fining Juvenile Offenders
Amir Whitaker, who was born in 1984, has lived in many places, including a brick house he shared with fourteen relatives in Plainfield, New Jersey. He slept on a suede couch pockmarked with cigarette burns. Whitaker’s father was in and out of prison, and many of his relatives—including his mother, aunts, and uncles–were addicted to drugs. The family got by on his grandparents’ Social Security checks.
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Related:An Insider-Trading Ruling That Delights Prosecutors—and One Manhattan Judge
The Top Legal Stories of 2017: Donald Trump’s Conflicts of Interest, Bill Cosby’s Assault Charge, and More
Coming to Terms with Trumponomics
December 23, 2016
The Sixteen Most-Read Stories from the New Yorker Archive in 2016
Every week or so, some article from our ninety-one-year-old archive stretches its legs, grabs its shoes—and perhaps its cane—and starts to amble around the Internet. It stops in at Facebook and Twitter, maybe with a hashtag like #longreads. Maybe it shows its face in r/TrueReddit, or in the New Yorker’s Sunday newsletter, or in the Spotlight or Archive sections of newyorker.com. Then it goes back home, where it waits quietly for the occasional greeting from Google.
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Related:The Best Time-Wasting of 2016
The Sixteen Most-Read New Yorker Blog Posts of 2016
The Year in Fashion: Down with the Élites!
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