George Packer's Blog, page 133

India Takes a Big Step Back from Cash

In the magazine’s Money Issue last month, I wrote about a strange new economic notion: a number of economists, led by Kenneth S. Rogoff, at Harvard, are advocating phasing out big bills in the U.S. and letting the remaining cash fall toward disuse. Their goal is partly to smother an increasingly vast underground economy. (About eighty per cent of the U.S. currency is in hundred-dollar bills, but the whereabouts of much of that cash is unknown.) But, as I noted in the piece, the American economists are not alone in their cashless tendencies, and in recent weeks their club increased by hundreds of millions of people. Earlier this month, the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, announced that, in an effort to account for his nation’s “black money,” the two largest Indian bills, the five-hundred-rupee and thousand-rupee notes—which together make up eighty-six per cent of outstanding cash—would immediately be retired as legal tender. Rarely has an appealing hypothetical encountered so extreme a real-world test case, and so soon.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Troubling Culture War Between India and Pakistan
India in Pieces
Apple’s Big Problem: Will India Buy iPhones?

Trump’s Challenge to American Democracy

Over Thanksgiving, I read up on some history: Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Berlusconi, Putin—“Strong Men 101.” I’d been meaning to do this for a while, and my resolve was strengthened after coming across an article on the risks of democratic erosion by Jeff Colgan, a political scientist at Brown University, who warned, “In light of Donald Trump’s illiberal tendencies, we have to take seriously the (unlikely) possibility that democracy and rule of law could weaken in the United States.” To help guard against this possibility, Colgan offered ten “warning signs of democratic breakdown.” They included attacks and restrictions on the press, vilification of foreigners and minorities, the intimidation of legislators, and the use of crises to justify emergency security measures.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s Choice on Cuba
President-Elect Trump’s Cabinet Picks
Ivanka Trump’s Terrible Book Helps Explain the Trump-Family Ethos

Protecting Journalism from Donald Trump

The abbreviated holiday week brought with it a full measure of developments in the moral quandary in which the press has found itself since Donald Trump became a candidate, and, more acutely, since he won the Presidency, three weeks ago. Nothing in Trump’s combative meeting with television-news journalists and executives, last Monday, or his decision to cancel, then un-cancel, a meeting with the Times, on Tuesday, departs from what sixteen months of campaigning indicated about his personality, outlook, and inclinations. He is who we thought he was. Trump reportedly lambasted the media as “liars” in his Monday-evening meeting. His Tuesday meeting with the Times lasted seventy-five minutes, during which time he alternately expressed interest in a better relationship with the publication and complained of what he saw as unfair treatment he’d received in its pages. After the meeting concluded, Brian Stelter, the CNN media critic, tweeted that “Trump deserves credit for sitting around the table with NYT reporters/editors & answering pointed Q’s.” But this is, more accurately, a reflection of how low Trump’s frequent fulminations at the press have set the bar—the minimal courtesy of sitting in a room without dispensing too many insults is considered a major sign of détente.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Afternoon Cartoon: Monday, November 28th
The Recount Road to Nowhere
Trump Picks El Chapo to Run D.E.A.

The Recount Road to Nowhere

Who started it this time? The behavior of Jill Stein, the Green Party Presidential candidate, who has filed in Wisconsin for a recount of votes cast in the Presidential election, and who plans to pursue recounts in Michigan and Pennsylvania as well, has been frustrating; that of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party contender, who joined the effort, human but disappointing; and that of Donald Trump, the President-elect, outrageous and destructive. The recount business has not brought out the best in anybody, and in Trump it has brought out the worst: in a series of tweets Sunday night, he alleged that millions of votes were fraudulent, enough to cost him the popular vote. None of this is going to produce any change in the results of the 2016 election. The sole item it may deliver is the one thing the country had been spared with Trump’s victory: a corrosive, conspiracy-minded, and slanderous attack on the integrity of our voting system. This is a critical period in which the shape of Trump’s Administration will be formed, one that presents all sorts of tasks and challenges for his opponents. Democrats have better things to do.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Protecting Journalism from Donald Trump
Morning Cartoon: Monday, November 28th
Trump Picks El Chapo to Run D.E.A.

Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

Silicon Valley seems to have lost a bit of its verve since the Presidential election. The streets of San Francisco—spiritually part of the Valley—feel less crowded. Coffee-shop conversations are hushed. Everything feels a little muted, an eerie quiet broken by chants of protesters. It even seems as if there are more parking spots. Technology leaders, their employees, and those who make up the entire technology ecosystem seem to have been shaken up and shocked by the election of Donald Trump.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Protecting Journalism from Donald Trump
The Recount Road to Nowhere
Trump Picks El Chapo to Run D.E.A.

The Tragic, Forgotten History of Black Military Veterans

In the week after the election, the Equal Justice Initiative, of Montgomery, Alabama, released a new report—a fifty-three-page addendum to last year’s “Lynching in America,” an unprecedentedly thorough survey of American racial violence and terror between 1877 and 1950. Drawing on small-town newspaper and court archives, along with interviews of local historians and victims’ descendants across the South, “Lynching in America” tallied four thousand and seventy-five lynchings, at least eight hundred more than any previous count. The new report, “Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans,” concludes that, during the same period, “no one was more at risk of experiencing violence and targeted racial terror than black veterans.” The susceptibility of black ex-soldiers to extrajudicial murder and assault has long been recognized by historians, but the topic has never received such comprehensive standalone treatment. In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, it seems eerily relevant.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Learning Trump Won, in West Virginia
Creating “Luke Cage,” the First Woke Black-Superhero Show
Trump and the Truth: Black Outreach as Campaign Ploy

Why Can’t Silicon Valley Solve Its Diversity Problem?

Earlier this year, Facebook released its diversity numbers—which were only incrementally higher than they had been a year before, despite several internal initiatives—in a blog post that outlined what is usually known as the “pipeline” problem. “Appropriate representation in technology . . . will depend upon more people having the opportunity to gain necessary skills through the public education system,” Maxine Williams, the company’s global director of diversity, wrote. Later that day, an essay, “Invisible Talent,” circulated across my social-media feeds and Slack back channels. “I haven’t even started my first full-time job yet and I’m already so tired of feeling erased and mistreated by the tech industry,” it read.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Peter Thiel’s Oddly Conventional Defense of Trump
The Real Soylent Sickness
The Hidden Benefits of Not Taking a Compliment

Postscript: Fidel Castro, 1926-2016

Fidel Castro has died. Few political leaders of modern times have been as iconic or as enduring as the Cuban revolutionary, who had turned ninety in August. He had been formally retired since 2008—he had handed power over to his younger brother Raúl two years before, after falling seriously ill—but he had ruled as Cuba’s jefe máximo for no less than forty-nine years, and he remained Cuba’s undisputed revolutionary patriarch until his death.

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Related:
The Activists of Crimson Tide Country
The François Fillon Experiment
Our Artists Get Ready for Thanksgiving

The Adorable Ads that Are About to Invade Your Text Messages

In October, 1994, Hotwired, the digital counterpart of Wired, ran the world’s first online banner ads. Fourteen companies pitched their wares, including Club Med, Volvo, and Zima. A.T. & T.’s ad, a modest black rectangle with rainbow-swirl borders, asked, “Have you ever clicked your mouse RIGHT HERE?” and proclaimed, “YOU WILL.” Forty-four per cent of those who saw the ad clicked on it.

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Introducing New Yorker iMessage Stickers, by Christoph Niemann
What Snapchat Might Learn from Facebook
Useful New Texting Acronyms

The Activists of Crimson Tide Country

On June 9, 1964, in the summer heat of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, a group of protesters led by the Reverend T. Y. Rogers, Jr., a disciple of Martin Luther King, Jr., planned a march from the First African Baptist Church to the county courthouse, in protest of the building’s segregated water fountains and bathrooms. They made it less than twenty yards before police, sanctioned by Governor George Wallace, attacked them. One of the protesters, Irene Byrd, who was sixteen at the time, ran into the church for safety, only to be hit with tear gas and water hoses shooting in from the stained-glass windows. “Some people went to the hospital, some people went to jail,” Byrd, now a retired school principal, told me. When she was finally able to leave the church, she faced a line of white Tuscaloosans jeering at her from across the street.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The François Fillon Experiment
Our Artists Get Ready for Thanksgiving
Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Big-Donor Education Secretary