George Packer's Blog, page 135

Trump’s Ideas Man For Hard-Line Immigration Policy

During Mitt Romney’s campaign for President, in 2012, he claimed that he could solve the political conundrum of immigration reform by getting undocumented immigrants to “self-deport” from the United States en masse. He was roundly mocked for the idea. Why would millions of people voluntarily leave a country they’d long considered home? His suggestion, though, was hardly a flub—it was meant to be a serious threat. For Kris Kobach, the adviser who sold Romney on the concept, the eventuality of widespread self-deportation was entirely feasible. The government simply had to make life so unrelentingly difficult for immigrants that they’d have no other choice.

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Related:
Barney Frank Looks for the Bright Side of Trump’s Win
Afternoon Cartoon: Tuesday, November 22nd
Trump’s Businesses Represent an Impossible Conflict of Interest

What Snapchat Might Learn from Facebook

In the week before the election, for forty-eight hours, you could open Snapchat and see President Obama trying to get you to vote for Hillary Clinton. The appearance, on a made-for-Snapchat political show called “Good Luck America,” was notable only because of where it was happening: on an app for people in their teens and twenties, who, as far as many people in their thirties and up can tell, mostly use it to send one another pictures of their faces morphed into tacos. At the time, it was only just becoming clear that the churn of news on the best-known social-media platforms had profoundly influenced public opinion about the Presidential candidates. But Snapchat was different. If Facebook and Twitter were crowded town squares—the locus of democracy at its meanest and dirtiest—Snapchat was the playground around the corner, a place reserved for silliness and fun. In August, Farhad Manjoo wrote in the Times that the app was among several that were “creating a charming alternative universe online—a welcome form of earnest, escapist entertainment that makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside.” For the President to appear on the app was unusual, and even his performance there seemed almost jokey at moments. “People, this is Barack Obama,” the President proclaimed at one point, the video angle suggestive of a selfie. “If I can figure out how to Snapchat, you can figure out how to go vote.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Useful New Texting Acronyms
The Analog Spaces in Digital Companies
The Failure of Facebook Democracy

Trump’s Businesses Represent an Impossible Conflict of Interest

During the past couple of weeks, Donald Trump has led the media in a merry dance, turning the workings of a transition team and staffing of an Administration into a television reality show, complete with elaborately staged auditions at real-world locations (Trump Tower, Trump National Golf Club), public humiliations (Chris Christie), and surprise appearances (Eva Moskowitz, Mitt Romney). Meanwhile, Trump has said next to nothing about one of the most pressing questions he faces: What does he intend to do with his far-flung business interests and the glaring conflicts of interest they potentially represent?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Barney Frank Looks for the Bright Side of Trump’s Win
Trump’s Ideas Man For Hard-Line Immigration Policy
Afternoon Cartoon: Tuesday, November 22nd

Donald Trump Personally Blasts the Press

The fantasy of the normalization of Donald Trump—the idea that a demagogic candidate would somehow be transformed into a statesman of poise and deliberation after his Election Day victory—should now be a distant memory, an illusion shattered.

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Related:
Why Won’t Donald Trump Denounce Sandy Hook Deniers?
The Renewed Relevance of “Hamilton”
More Broadway Recommendations for Mike Pence

Why Won’t Donald Trump Denounce Sandy Hook Deniers?

In the rank confusion of Donald Trump’s preparations to assume power, there are some decisions that look as if they should be easy. Last week, Erica Lafferty wrote the President-elect an open letter asking him to cut ties with the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Lafferty is the daughter of Dawn Hochsprung, who was the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut. On December 14, 2012, Hochsprung was shot to death while trying to stop Adam Lanza, who murdered twenty children and six other adults that morning, before killing himself. Jones, who is based in Austin, Texas, and runs a radio show and Web site called Infowars, has repeatedly argued that the mass killing at Sandy Hook was a hoax, that it was staged by the government and performed by paid actors. Jones and many of his fans contend that the government has orchestrated a number of mass shootings and national tragedies, including the September 11th terror attacks and the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, but their Sandy Hook denial has a particular cruelty. They actually seem to make special efforts to torment the bereaved.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump Personally Blasts the Press
The Renewed Relevance of “Hamilton”
More Broadway Recommendations for Mike Pence

The Enduring Scandal of Trump University

Give Donald Trump one thing: He’s mastered the political art of diverting attention from damaging news stories. On Friday afternoon, Trump’s lawyers and the Attorney General of New York, Eric Schneiderman, announced that they had reached an agreement to settle three civil cases brought against the President-elect and Trump University, the scandal-plagued learning annex that he operated from 2005 to 2011.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Americans Against Trump Can Learn from the Failures of the Israeli Opposition
What the Presidency is Worth to Donald Trump
Getting to Know Your Safety Pin

A Death on the Tracks

The 1 train slowed down as usual upon entering the Times Square station on Monday, November 7th, at 1:20 P.M., but then it braked so hard that those of us standing stumbled to keep our balance. The doors didn’t open. Outside, on the platform, people moved in various directions instead of waiting for the train. Transit workers in orange vests arrived, running. I watched through the windows of the second car. The workers shone their flashlights onto the track between my car and the front car. Next we saw a policeman put handcuffs on a woman, behind her back. Nobody speculated out loud about what might have happened.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
New York City’s Graveyard Shift
A Dark Night at the Javits Center
Single City Slickers: Then and Now

What Americans Against Trump Can Learn from the Failures of the Israeli Opposition

For any Israeli who lived through the “mahapach,” the electoral “upending” of 1977, which brought Menachem Begin’s Likud party to power, Donald Trump’s victory seems dreadfully familiar. It is not simply that America’s most benighted voters—people from the entitled, stressed majority, people living in what has been euphemistically called the “periphery”—turned a protest vote into an unlikely victory for an extremist leader. It is that this protest seems permanent, aimed not at a party or candidate but at the establishment, while the voters themselves seem so fierce in their resentment that they stand to become a permanent fixture of a rightist bloc. During the Obama Administration, Likud became an ally of the Republicans. Now it seems a model for them.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What the Presidency is Worth to Donald Trump
Getting to Know Your Safety Pin
What Trump’s Presidency Will Mean for the Dreamers

The Analog Spaces in Digital Companies

Primo Orpilla, the co-founder of the architecture and design firm Studio O+A, has been designing offices for digital-technology companies for more than thirty years, basically since the start of the PC era. His clients have included Cisco and Microsoft, PayPal and Facebook, Uber and Yelp. I met with Orpilla a year and a half ago, at Yelp, which occupies a dozen floors of a historic office tower in downtown San Francisco and where he walked me through his theory of tech-office design. That theory, in short, is this: the more digital the company, the more analog the space should feel.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What the Presidency is Worth to Donald Trump
What It Would Take to Set American Kids Free
Are Smartphones Ruining Distance Running?

What Trump’s Presidency Will Mean for the Dreamers

In November, 2014, when news stories about Donald Trump, if he was in the news at all, made him seem nothing more than a buffoon, President Obama issued a series of executive actions on immigration. One of them expanded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, which allowed immigrants brought to the U.S. as children—often referred to as “Dreamers”—to apply for work permits and temporary protection against deportation. DAPA, another new program, offered the same assurances to undocumented immigrant parents whose children were U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Some five million immigrants might have benefitted, but the programs were put on hold in May, 2015, by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld an injunction issued by a judge in Texas. After the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, organizations and immigrants remained in a state of suspense.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Americans Against Trump Can Learn from the Failures of the Israeli Opposition
What the Presidency is Worth to Donald Trump
Getting to Know Your Safety Pin