George Packer's Blog, page 126

The Sixteen Most-Read New Yorker Blog Posts of 2016

We publish about fifteen pieces a day on this Web site, and it’s not often that they make me cry. But the first story on this list did. It’s the tale of my friend Paul Kalanithi’s last day practicing medicine, excerpted from his memoir about dealing with terminal metastatic lung cancer, “When Breath Becomes Air.” And the last story on this list nearly did, too: it’s Patti Smith’s tale of trying to sing “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” at the Nobel Prize ceremony honoring Bob Dylan. Read it to the final sentence.

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The Strange Case of the American Death Penalty

It’s a paradoxical moment in the history of the death penalty in the United States. The number of executions has dwindled to just a few, but the voters, even in the most liberal states, seem to want the punishment to remain on the books. That’s the message of the annual report from the Death Penalty Information Center, which produces the most comprehensive analysis of the subject each year.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Ten Best Business Quotes of 2016

Business journalists have a habit of complaining to one another that corporate executives, and the people in their immediate orbit, make for painful interviews: executives admit little that hasn’t been approved by a troop of lawyers and public-relations minders, they speak in business jargon, and their solicitousness grates. Those who buck that trend include this year’s most-quoted businessman, Donald Trump. From him and nine others—some who wield corporate power, others who have observed it—here are ten of this year’s most memorable quotes about business and the economy, presented in chronological order.

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Russia’s View of the Election Hacks: Denials, Amusement, Comeuppance

By now, the basic facts of the case appear largely settled: hackers working in coördination with—or on direct orders from—Vladimir Putin’s government broke into the e-mail accounts of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, passing the contents to WikiLeaks, which published them in slow drips over the summer and fall. Clinton, of course, lost last month’s Presidential election; Democrats quickly seized on the hacks, and the media coverage of them, to help explain the outcome. Anonymous sources at the C.I.A.—and, later, the F.B.I. and other intelligence agencies—told the Washington Post that aiding Trump’s candidacy was exactly the point of the Russian operation. Yet many important questions remain unanswered. What was the ultimate effect of the Russian hacks? Why did the Russians do it, and how, in his final days in office, should Barack Obama respond?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Road from Saddam Hussein to Donald Trump

As the members of the Electoral College gathered across the country on Monday, to elect the next President, there was another rash of articles seeking to explain how an untested candidate, whose approval rating stood at 37.5 per cent on November 8th, had managed to defeat an opponent who was a former First Lady, U.S. senator, and Secretary of State. But the piece that caught my eye wasn’t directly tied to the election. It was a gripping review in the Times of a new book by John Nixon, a former C.I.A. officer, who was the first agency official to interview Saddam Hussein after American forces captured him hiding in a hole in the ground near the Iraqi city of Tikrit, in December, 2003.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Berlin Attack Is Right Out of the Terror Handbooks

The world’s deadliest terrorist groups are increasingly open about their intentions, tactics, and targets. Last month, Rumiyah, the slickest terrorist magazine on the Internet market, was very precise. The “most appropriate” killing vehicle, the Islamic State publication advised, is a “load-bearing truck” that is “double-wheeled, giving victims less of a chance to escape being crushed by the vehicle’s tires.” It should be “heavy in weight, assuring the destruction of whatever it hits.” It should also have a “slightly raised chassis and bumper, which allow for the mounting of sidewalks and breeching of barriers if needed.” And it should have a “reasonably fast” rate of acceleration.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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North Carolina’s Partisan Crisis

Since 2008, when Barack Obama defeated John McCain by a little more than fourteen thousand votes in North Carolina, the state’s political scene has been closely divided. In 2010, Republicans took control of both houses of the state legislature for the first time in a century, and moved rapidly to redraw the state’s electoral districts, turning their narrow majority of votes into a deadlock on the legislature. After the G.O.P. won the governor’s office in 2012, they launched a wave of legislation to limit ballot access, restrict abortion rights, and open the state to fracking. A wave of weekly “Moral Mondays” protests, led by religious progressives, began in 2013, and more than a thousand people were peacefully arrested at the State Legislative Building, in Raleigh.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Electoral College Does Not Revolt

The procedures of the Electoral College have not been much modernized. On Monday, Illinois electors arrived in the state capitol, in Springfield, to cast their votes, and each was presented with a paper ballot and a commemorative pen, wrapped in cellophane. The electors were meant to mark their selections with an “X,” ink on blue paper, after which the ballots would be sent to the National Archives, in Washington, D.C., where they will rest, under seal, until January 7th, when the Vice-President will open and ceremonially count them. Until then, there is no formal mechanism to know how the votes have gone. If this was to be the scene of a revolution, as some liberals and electors had in the past month begun to hope, it would have been a very strange one, carried out via pen and ink by people whom, for the most part, no one knew anything about.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Sixteen Most-Read New Yorker Magazine Stories of 2016

Americans, as you may have heard, like to read about Donald Trump and his family. Readers of The New Yorker are no exception to that rule, but they also like some other things, too, at least according to the data we’ve got here on the most-read stories from the magazine this year. We like sex, we like death, and we like music. We also, it seems, really like to read about food—whether that means restaurant critics or possible frauds. And, of course, we like to read about money: whether it’s about how young Chinese women in Vancouver spend it or how Mr. Money Mustache says you can save it. And, in something of a surprise, our readers really liked to read in midwinter. Three of our most-read stories come from the end of February. Maybe that’s because Trump hadn’t yet come to totally dominate our screens, or maybe it’s because it’s just nice to sip warm tea and read about TMZ as the icicles form.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Undocumented Immigrants Brace for the Trump Administration

One night late last month, Antonio Alarcón, a twenty-two-year-old senior at CUNY, came home to the apartment he shares with his uncle and aunt, who are undocumented, and found a pile of boxes and bags stacked by the door. “We want to be prepared,” they told him, in case immigration authorities raided the residence. Then they all sat down to eat dinner.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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