George Packer's Blog, page 147

The Secret Eye Inside Mosul

Shortly after the Islamic State swept into Iraq, in June, 2014, a clandestine blog called Mosul Eye appeared on the Internet. It provided details about life under the caliphate—initially offering hourly reports regarding roads around Mosul that were safe to travel, and then, in the following weeks, reporting on the dawning anxiety about the heavily armed ISIS fighters, the power blackouts, the rising prices, the chaos in local markets, the panic over food shortages, and the occupiers’ utter brutality. Over the next year, Mosul Eye expanded into a Facebook page and a Twitter account. The posts were determinedly stoic—melancholic and inspiring at once.

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Related:
The Dangers of the Iraqi Coalition Headed Toward Mosul
ISIS on the Run
The Real Nuclear Threat

The Wealth Gap in Philanthropy

Each year, Stacy Palmer, the editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, compiles a list of the U.S. charities that have raised the most money from private sources. In the twenty-six years that the Philanthropy 400 ranking has been published, one thing has stayed constant: United Way Worldwide is at the top. (The one exception was in 1996, when the Salvation Army briefly displaced it.) But when the results started coming in for this year’s list, which was published on Thursday morning, it became clear that a new No. 1 had emerged—an organization affiliated with Fidelity Investments, called Fidelity Charitable, which has grown to become one of the most influential charities in the world. “I was stunned,” Palmer recalled. The details were especially striking. Fidelity Charitable collected 4.6 billion dollars, a twenty-per-cent increase from the previous year. United Way ranked a distant second, with donations dropping by four per cent, to 3.7 billion dollars. “Not only were they”—Fidelity—“going to be No. 1, but they were going to be No. 1 by a lot,” Palmer remembered realizing.

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Novels of White Status Anxiety
How the N.B.A.’s Salary Cap Favors Talent-Rich Teams
Why Banks Don’t Play It Safe, Even When It Costs Them

Donald Trump’s Hotel We Can Believe In

“Today is a metaphor,” Donald Trump said yesterday morning, at a ceremony dedicating the new Trump Hotel in Washington, a renovation of the gorgeous Old Post Office, five blocks from the White House. His daughter Ivanka had already described the pains the Trump Organization had taken to preserve the “intricate stone carvings” and the “extraordinary millwork” of the 1899 building. The C.E.O. of Trump Hotels, Eric Danziger, described himself, winningly, as a “former bellman,” mentioned that two couples had already been married in the hotel, and provided a lesson in the origin of the word “Welcome,” which, he said, derived from an “old innkeeping term that means ‘it is well that you come.’” The ballroom looked expansive and the bar grand; it seemed a very nice place to stay.

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Did Trump and Clinton Get a Pass on Education?
Why a Brexit Shocker Is Unlikely Here
The Post-Trump Fate of the Reformicons

The Post-Trump Fate of the Reformicons

Pity the Reformicons, if you can. The loose network of relatively young conservatives who adopted that label, including writers such as David Frum, Reihan Salam, and Yuval Levin, have, for more than a decade, decried the Republican Party for allowing the donor class to write its policies even as it relied on working-class voters for its electoral success. Republicans, they argued, were fixated on a stale Reagan-era agenda of cutting taxes, reducing regulations, and trimming Social Security and Medicare benefits, none of which addressed the struggles of their base.

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Afternoon Cartoon: Wednesday, October 26th
Trump-Pence 2016: On the Campaign Bus
How the Democrats Became the Party of the University

How the Democrats Became the Party of the University

Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton held a rally on Monday at St. Anselm College, a Benedictine school on a pretty hill a few miles from downtown Manchester, New Hampshire. It was a clear, windy day, and the two former law professors stood on a platform in the middle of the campus quad, looking very much at home. The high windows of the red-brick hall behind them were crammed with student faces, looking down on the stage. As the event began, there was a burst of loud enthusiasm, and Clinton said into the microphone, proudly, that these were some “unruly women” from her class at Wellesley. They were unruly in the sense that an honors seminar can sometimes be unruly, and they quickly settled down to listen to her speak.

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Related:
The Post-Trump Fate of the Reformicons
Trump-Pence 2016: On the Campaign Bus
Hillary Clinton’s Mandate Problem

Ancient History and Short-Term Memories in World Series Game 1

Last night’s broadcast of Game 1 of the World Series, on Fox, opened with a video featuring eighty-, ninety-, and hundred-year-old fans of the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians talking about the years they’ve spent watching their favorite team lose. “I’m damn sick and tired of waiting,” a particularly charming hundred-and-four-year-old woman in an Indians T-shirt said. As is well known by this point, the Cubs have not won a World Series since 1908, when the Yankees were still known as the Highlanders and the Dodgers were the Superbas, and they had not even participated in one since 1945, two years before Jackie Robinson integrated baseball. The Indians, meanwhile, have not won a title since 1948, when the ageless Negro League folk hero Satchel Paige was on the roster, and they hadn’t reached the Series since the mid-nineties, when they suffered two heartbreaking defeats, in 1995 and 1997. It seemed, then, that this intro would set a schmaltzy tone for the undoubtedly historic series to come. But mostly, despite occasional references by the announcer Joe Buck to both teams’ championship droughts, the broadcast showed restraint in not dwelling on the past more than it did.

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Morning Cartoon: Wednesday, October 26th
Morning Cartoon: Monday, October 24th
The New York City Marathon Quadruplets

Hillary Clinton’s Mandate Problem

According to most projections, Hillary Clinton is on track for an electoral-college landslide in the coming election, and Democrats have a good chance of gaining control of the Senate and expanding their ranks in the House. But it’s not entirely clear that Americans will be voting for Clinton. During the past year, she’s had lower favorability ratings than any major-party nominee in history, with one important exception: her opponent, Donald Trump. Regardless of the margin of victory, Clinton will have a mandate problem.

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Related:
The Post-Trump Fate of the Reformicons
Afternoon Cartoon: Wednesday, October 26th
Trump-Pence 2016: On the Campaign Bus

Three Ways to Fix Obamacare

It has long been clear that many of the health-insurance companies offering policies through the public exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act of 2010 were losing money. Some big operators, including Aetna, Humana, and United Health Care, have withdrawn from a number of the exchanges, and those insurers that remain have been indicating their intention to raise prices sharply for 2017. “The reality is the Affordable Care Act is no longer affordable,” Mark Dayton, the Democratic governor of Minnesota, said earlier this month. So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when the Obama Administration this week formally acknowledged that prices will go up for plans purchased on the exchanges.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Post-Trump Fate of the Reformicons
Trump-Pence 2016: On the Campaign Bus
How the Democrats Became the Party of the University

Trump and the Conspiracists, at Home and Abroad

In the spring of 2008, during the primary campaign that, on the Democratic side, pitted the veteran political figure Hillary Clinton against the ascendant upstart Barack Obama, I visited a friend in White Bluff, Tennessee. A small, down-at-heel country town that sits in forested countryside about an hour west of Nashville, White Bluff is perhaps best known nowadays for a roadside barbecue place, Carl’s Perfect Pig, that draws customers from miles around. The median income of the town’s three-thousand-odd people, ninety-eight per cent of whom are white, is around forty thousand dollars. One morning, my friend and I found ourselves in a pharmacy, waiting for a prescription to be filled. There was a TV, with its sound turned off, flashing the customary wall of images about the campaign season. Clinton’s face soon appeared on the screen, followed by Obama’s. A man standing in line next to me, holding the hand of a young boy who was perhaps six years old, remarked loudly, “That Obama. He’s a Muslim.” I said, “No, I don’t think he is. He’s a Christian.” He shook his head and retorted, “No, sir. He’s a Muslim. I heard him say so himself, right there on CNN.”

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Related:
Afternoon Cartoon: Tuesday, October 25th
Morning Cartoon: Tuesday, October 25th
Hillary Clinton’s Plan to Squeeze the Ultra-Rich

A.T. & T. Wants Time Warner for Eyes, Ears, and Ads

On Saturday, when A.T. & T. announced that it hopes to acquire Time Warner for more than eighty-five billion dollars, one of its chosen avenues for doing so was to post a video on YouTube. On it, the A.T. & T. and Time Warner logos appear together onscreen, and then A.T. & T.’s C.E.O., Randall Stephenson, appears, wearing a jacket, but no tie, in front of a bland corporate backdrop. “The media and communications industries are converging, and, when it comes down to it, premium content always wins,” he says, speaking directly to the camera. He is followed by Time Warner’s C.E.O., Jeff Bewkes, who talks to the camera about strategic priorities and distribution channels while sitting in front of a New York City skyline. This goes on for three minutes. As of Tuesday morning, the video had some nineteen thousand views. It did not go viral.

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Related:
Exploring the Lost Grandeur of New York City’s Verizon Building
Net Neutrality Is Great, but It Won’t Make Broadband Cheaper
Why Companies Won’t Learn From the T-Mobile/Experian Hack