George Packer's Blog, page 145

Assad Speaks

Early Monday evening, Bashar al-Assad, the President of Syria, stood at the front door of his palace in central Damascus to meet a group of American reporters and researchers. Tall and slender, dressed in a blue suit and tie, Assad greeted each of us with a smile and a handshake. His house—a large, ornate structure built in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire—is situated inside a secure zone, behind a maze of checkpoints and blast walls. Assad, who speaks English from his time as a medical student in England, seemed eager to begin. “I’m going to be very transparent and talk about everything,” he said.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
“I Have Outlived My Own Life”: Living Under Siege in Aleppo
The Secret Eye Inside Mosul
Making Peace with Trump’s Revolutionaries

How Trump Fumbled Social Security Like No Republican Before Him

For a half century, Republican candidates have tried to use Presidential debates as opportunities to connect with the electorate on the topic of Social Security. Add this to the list of norms that Donald Trump has broken. In the video above, I explain how Trump handled Social Security like no Republican before him.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why the Fight to Control Congress Is Crippling Our Democracy
The Quiet Ruthlessness of the Clinton Campaign
The Book That Predicted Trump

Why Vine Was a Bad Match for Twitter

On Sunday, October 23rd, Michael Pachter and a friend took out the boat they jointly own, a Boston Whaler, on the Pacific Ocean, to watch the final day of the Breitling Huntington Beach Airshow. Like most air shows, it promised to entertain spectators with the sight of gaudily painted fighter jets performing impossible stunts in close formation. After the show, as Pachter was motoring the eight miles back to Long Beach, four F-16s—part of the United States Air Force Air Demonstration Squadron, known as the Thunderbirds, which had headlined the show—rocketed past, flying low overhead on their way back to Nevada’s Nellis Air Force Base. They flew past “literally a hundred yards away—so loud it was earth-shattering,” Pachter said. His immediate impulse was to pull out his phone and record a video of their booming flight.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Long Live the Macintosh Startup Chime
Vine and the New Gatekeepers of Self-Expression
The Creepiest Pictures on the Internet

Paul Ryan on the Road for Donald Trump

“If Donald Trump becomes President, do you see your vision and his vision aligning in a way to get things done?” a reporter for KETV, in Nebraska, asked Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, on Sunday, as Ryan campaigned for a local congressional candidate. A moment earlier, Ryan had talked about getting “beneath the personality question.” But, as the subject switched to Trump, he answered with what sounded like eager anticipation. “Yes—I’ve spoken to him a number of times and he does support our agenda,” Ryan said. “So I do know we have common cause on the big, critical foundational issues of the day.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why the Fight to Control Congress Is Crippling Our Democracy
The Quiet Ruthlessness of the Clinton Campaign
How Trump Fumbled Social Security Like No Republican Before Him

Peter Thiel’s Oddly Conventional Defense of Trump

Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire investor, seemed out of place, diminished, when he walked up to a podium at the National Press Club on Monday. Thiel has made a fortune and cultivated a public persona based on his confident predictions about technologies that most of us barely understand. His mode of talking, in the past, could be called utopian/dystopian Manicheanism. He has described a marvellous world that could be—space colonies and abundance fuelled by biotech, cheap energy, and brilliant robots—and then explained why our risk-averse culture and stifling, confiscatory government prevent us from achieving what should be ours.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Quiet Ruthlessness of the Clinton Campaign
How Trump Fumbled Social Security Like No Republican Before Him
The Book That Predicted Trump

The Trouble with Doug Band

In November, 2011, some employees at the Clinton Foundation told Chelsea Clinton about an alarming situation in what she has called “my father’s world.” The concerns were complicated and Chelsea wasn’t sure which ones were true, but they orbited around one of her father’s senior aides at the Clinton Foundation, Doug Band, and a more junior one, Justin Cooper. Chelsea’s informants thought that Band and Cooper were leveraging their connections with Bill Clinton for their own profit, and Chelsea herself seemed to agree.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Afternoon Cartoon: Tuesday, November 1st
Why the Fight to Control Congress Is Crippling Our Democracy
The Quiet Ruthlessness of the Clinton Campaign

“I Have Outlived My Own Life”: Living Under Siege in Aleppo

In the early hours of September 23rd, Omar Dawood was sleeping in a second-floor bedroom in eastern Aleppo with his wife and three children when a rocket hit their building. Three of four structures housing the White Helmets, a volunteer rescue group, had also been hit that morning, and Dawood and his family remained trapped until friends climbed up the rubble and helped them out of a window. Of the three families who were home that night, only Dawood’s was spared death. “It was a smog of dust. If we had stayed inside for five more minutes, we would have suffocated,” Dawood said. No one from the apartment above Dawood’s survived.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
ISIS on the Run
Putin, Syria, and Why Moscow Has Gone War-Crazy
Memories of a Childhood Split Between France and the Middle East

Why Is Donald Trump in Michigan and Wisconsin?

According to the polls, Donald Trump has been trailing Hillary Clinton badly in Michigan and Wisconsin for months. In Michigan, two surveys taken last week showed Clinton leading by seven percentage points. In a third poll, the margin was six points. It’s a similar story in Wisconsin, where the past three polls have shown Clinton ahead by four points, six points, and seven points.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Bonus Cartoon: Monday, October 31st
Trevor Noah’s Crash Course in Surviving an American Election
Will Republicans Fight to Shrink the Supreme Court?

Almost There

Yes. The Cubs won, 3–2, avoiding extinction, and there will be more baseball. Thank you, everybody. Thanks for letting it happen, all you Cubs down there—Kris Bryant, David Ross, Jon Lester, Aroldis Chapman, etc. And back there—Ernie Banks, Hank Sauer, Charlie Grimm. And thanks to all you Indians present and past—Rajai Davis, Andrew Miller, CoCo Crisp, Sandy Alomar, Jr., Earl Averill, Nap Lajoie. The Cubs, trailing three games to one in this Series, were facing winter, but now will have a day off and a sixth game, and maybe even a glorious seventh. Baseball does this for us again and again, extending its pleasures fractionally before it glimmers and goes, but, let’s face it, this time a happy prolonging has less to do with baseball than ever before. This particular October handful has served to take our minds off a squalid and nearly endless and embarrassing election—three hours of floodlit opium or fentanyl that can almost erase all thoughts of Donald Trump’s angry slurs or Hillary Clinton’s long travails. If I could do it, I would make this World Series a best eight out of fifteen.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Ancient History and Short-Term Memories in World Series Game 1
Morning Cartoon: Wednesday, October 26th
Morning Cartoon: Monday, October 24th

Will Republicans Fight to Shrink the Supreme Court?

In 1936, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt was campaigning for reëlection, the fate of the New Deal appeared to be up in the air. During the preceding few years, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority had, in a series of rulings—many of them five to four—knocked down the central pillars of Roosevelt’s recovery program. F.D.R. had denounced the decisions, charging the Court with placing a “dead hand” on social progress, and many people on both sides of the struggle felt that nothing less than the survival of democracy was at stake. This made the issue of the Court “the most deadly dynamite” of that election year, as The Nation put it at the time. Roosevelt was developing a plan to flip the balance of the Court by increasing the number of Justices and packing the new seats with liberals. But he kept his plans to himself until the election had passed. Even his closest aides were in the dark. On the campaign trail, he dodged the issue nimbly—and completely.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why Is Donald Trump in Michigan and Wisconsin?
Bonus Cartoon: Monday, October 31st
Trevor Noah’s Crash Course in Surviving an American Election