George Packer's Blog, page 148

Clarence Thomas’s Twenty-Five Years Without Footprints

This month marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Clarence Thomas’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. Conservatives like Thomas have dominated the Court throughout his tenure, and he has been in the majority in all of their victories. That raises a question: What’s the most important opinion Thomas has written for the majority during his tenure on the Court?

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Afternoon Cartoon: Monday, October 24th
The Laws of Comedy
Tim Tebow Ponders a Future in Politics

Hillary Clinton’s Plan to Squeeze the Ultra-Rich

With all the attention given to whether Donald Trump would accept the results of the election, one major claim made by Hillary Clinton at last week’s Presidential debate was all but overlooked by the general public. Three times during the proceedings, Clinton asserted that her economic proposals—which call for about $1.65 trillion in additional spending over the next ten years on infrastructure, health care, education, and other items in the federal budget—wouldn’t “add a penny” to the national debt.

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Trump Surges Ahead of Clinton in Poll Conducted by His Brain
My Muslim Father’s Faith in America
Donald Trump and the Day After the Election

Investors Think President Trump Would Make Them Poorer

On September 26th, at 9 P.M., Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump walked onto the stage at Hofstra University, in Hempstead, Long Island, for the first of three scheduled debates. That day was Clinton’s polling nadir. She had fallen, precipitously, from a nearly ninety per cent lock, as predicted by FiveThirtyEight, to a less than fifty-five per cent chance of winning the Presidency. Trump had the momentum. A cough or a slip—of the tongue or the foot—might have done Clinton in, and more than eighty million viewers, eager to see what would happen in this most unpredictable of elections, tuned in for the most-watched Presidential debate in history.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Clarence Thomas’s Twenty-Five Years Without Footprints
Hillary Clinton’s Plan to Squeeze the Ultra-Rich
Trump Surges Ahead of Clinton in Poll Conducted by His Brain

Donald Trump and the Day After the Election

The starkest divide in this election is a new one, between white voters who have a college education and those who do not, and in each camp there is an uncertainty about what the other is capable of. Donald Trump’s supporters fear that the Clintonites are capable of rigging the election; liberals worry that, if Trump loses, some of his backers will resort to mass protests, or even violence. Trump himself is responsible for both uncertainties, having made the possibility of a rigged election the central drama of his speeches, and having refused to say whether he would accept the outcome of a vote in which he lost. Trump’s approach to conspiracy-mongering is squirmy—his accusations are often couched in the indirect language of what is possible, or of what “many people are saying”—and so it has not been easy to pin down the candidate on what he will say if he loses. In the third debate, Chris Wallace, the moderator, kept pressing the Republican nominee about whether he’d accept the outcome. “I’ll keep you in suspense,” Trump said, finally, and he has.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Hillary Clinton’s Plan to Squeeze the Ultra-Rich
Trump Surges Ahead of Clinton in Poll Conducted by His Brain
My Muslim Father’s Faith in America

The New York City Marathon Quadruplets

When Teresa Siemann learned that she was pregnant with quadruplets, she felt a mixture of excitement and anxiety. It was 1989. Siemann, who was born in Brooklyn, worked, at the time, as an emergency-room nurse at New York Methodist Hospital, in Park Slope—she was no stranger to the oddities of pregnancy and unconventional medical situations. “Still, it was surreal,” she told me recently. “We didn’t know what to expect.” Her husband, John, meanwhile, thought of sports. “When I heard there were going to be four, I thought, We’ll practically have a basketball team,” he said.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Most Pleasing Campaign of 2016
Welcome, 5K Runners!

Is Reconciliation Possible After the Election?

The local Republican Party office in Hillsborough, North Carolina, is tucked into a strip mall called the Shops at Daniel Boone. Early last Sunday morning, a bottle filled with explosive liquid flew through the window and started a fire. On the wall of an adjacent building, the attackers appear to have spray-painted a swastika and the words “Nazi Republicans leave town or else.” No one was hurt, but photographs from the scene show charred papers and yard signs, and a sofa reduced to little more than its springs.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Laws of Comedy
A Not-So-Funny Dinner with Clinton and Trump
Afternoon Cartoon: Friday, October 21st

A Not-So-Funny Dinner with Clinton and Trump

“You know, last night I called Hillary a nasty woman,” Donald Trump said at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, at the Waldorf-Astoria, on Thursday night. Hillary Clinton, who was sitting on the dais with him, separated only by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, of New York, tilted her head with a neutral expression, as Trump continued, “But this stuff is all relative. After listening to Hillary rattle on and on and on”—his voice descended into a groan—“I don’t think so badly of Rosie O’Donnell anymore. In fact, I’m actually starting to like Rosie a lot.” Clinton laughed, and the crowd did, too, with the slight hesitation of wondering where this was going, and if it was going to be all right. It wasn’t. It’s hard to know when Trump reached the point at which a great number of the people in the audience started to feel dirty. But once he did he never got out of the mud.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Is Reconciliation Possible After the Election?
The Laws of Comedy
Afternoon Cartoon: Friday, October 21st

The Student Protests Roiling South Africa

One afternoon last week, I went to the supermarket near my flat in Cape Town. The shop was almost empty, and as I stood and dithered over different kinds of spaghetti I could hear a woman and her friend in the next aisle discussing the protests. For nearly a year, students at many of South Africa’s public universities had been rallying against proposed national tuition hikes. The demonstrations had recently intensified, and the focus had shifted. Fee increases were no longer the issue; the protesters now demanded higher education that was both free and decolonized—scrubbed of its apartheid-era European bias. Campuses across the country, including the University of Cape Town (U.C.T.), were shut down. It seemed to be all people could talk about.

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David Goldblatt’s Portraits of Ex-Convicts at the Scenes of Their Crimes
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Lost and Found Photos from a South African Portrait Studio

Tim Tebow Ponders a Future in Politics

Tim Tebow currently has at least three careers. The former football star is now a baseball player—the Mets signed him to a minor-league contract last month—as well as a college-football analyst, for ESPN, and an author. “Shaken: Discovering Your True Identity in the Midst of Life’s Storms,” his second book, will be published next week. (It was written with A. J. Gregory.) He also puts a great deal of energy into the Tim Tebow Foundation, which is dedicated to helping children in need. And he says he can envision another potential career ahead, one that would combine his fondness for the limelight with his commitment to serving others: public office.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Laws of Comedy
The Art of the Rout: What a Trump Loss Does to the G.O.P.
Afternoon Cartoon: Thursday, October 20th

What Barnes & Noble Doesn’t Get About Bookstores

In April, Leonard Riggio announced that he was stepping away from Barnes & Noble, the business he bought forty-five years ago and transformed into the world’s largest brick-and-mortar bookstore chain. Come September, Riggio, now seventy-five, would happily retire. Or so he claimed. Though he had ceded the title of chief executive in 2002, Riggio remained the executive chairman and the soul and supreme authority of Barnes & Noble. Still, it seemed like a safe time to step down. Pummelled in recent years by Amazon’s dominance over the industry, and the hangover of the recession, Barnes & Noble had closed more than ten per cent of its stores and fended off hostile takeovers, but it was still alive. Its losses had levelled off, and sales were actually growing in many categories, including board games, vinyl records, and even some categories of books, the non-digital kind (like coloring books for grownups). In March, the company announced plans to open its first new stores in several years, and in June it unveiled its potential future: smaller locations, with full-service bars and restaurants, and a more boutique feel. It seemed to be a move away from the model of “superstores” that the company once defined itself by.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Drawing the World’s Greatest Bookstores
Walmart’s Three-Billion-Dollar Hire
Apple, Google, Amazon, and the Advantages of Bigness