George Packer's Blog, page 150
October 19, 2016
Twitter’s Anti-Semitism Problem
Yesterday morning, Jonathan Weisman, an editor at the Times, woke up and looked at Twitter, where he had a public message from a stranger. “Hostile foreign power?” it said. “Jews.”
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Ivanka Trump and Her Father
The Third Presidential Debate: Live-Drawing by Jason Adam Katzenstein
What Michael Moore Understands About Hillary Clinton
The Vanishing Republican Party
American political parties must have a great capacity for survival, or how could they have endured this long? Herbert Croly, who co-founded The New Republic, in 1914, liked to say that the Republicans and Democrats were (to borrow a paraphrase from Walter Lippmann’s recollection of Croly) like primitive organisms that can’t easily be killed: if their heads and tentacles are lopped off, they grow new ones. That has been pretty much true of the major parties, at least insofar as anyone alive can recall. The overwhelming defeat of the Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, in 1964—by what was, at the time, the biggest popular-vote margin in American history—was not, as it turned out, an enduring crisis for his party. Rather, defeat was followed, four years later, by the victory of another Republican, the former Vice-President Richard Nixon. Nor did the defeat of Senator George McGovern, in 1972, by an even larger margin than Goldwater’s, wreck the Democratic Party (Jimmy Carter won four years later), though it did alter its DNA, moving it leftward, much as Goldwater moved Republicans rightward. In good times and bad, this primitive organism survived. Or it has so far.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Ivanka Trump and Her Father
The Third Presidential Debate: Live-Drawing by Jason Adam Katzenstein
What Michael Moore Understands About Hillary Clinton
Debate Preview: Trump Looks Set to Rant to the Bitter End
It’s fitting that this year’s third and final Presidential debate will be held in Las Vegas. For Donald Trump, who during the nineteen-eighties and nineties built a short-lived casino empire in Atlantic City, Vegas has long represented the big time that he couldn’t quite crack. Although he currently co-owns a high-rise hotel on the northern end of the famous Strip, he has never had any gaming interests in Nevada. Now it looks like Trump’s Presidential ambitions, or, at least, the most widely watched manifestation of them, will come to an end in Sin City.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Ivanka Trump and Her Father
The Third Presidential Debate: Live-Drawing by Jason Adam Katzenstein
What Michael Moore Understands About Hillary Clinton
Van Jones and Kayleigh McEnany Try to Fight the Right Way
On Monday night, a day before travelling to Las Vegas to cover the final Presidential prizefight, the left-leaning CNN political commentator Van Jones took the stage at Southeast Missouri State University, in Cape Girardeau, to debate his right-leaning CNN counterpart Kayleigh McEnany, in front of a thousand Trump-leaning students. Jones is a forty-eight-year-old Yale Law School graduate and the president of a social-justice accelerator called the Dream Corps; he worked in the Obama Administration and supported Bernie Sanders before Clinton won the nomination. McEnany is a twenty-eight-year-old Harvard Law School graduate who interned in the second Bush Administration and has supported Donald Trump since the primaries. This was the first time they’d met on a stage, at lecterns, with their own debate moderator—Rick Althaus, an avuncular professor of political science at the university—to discuss what Jones later described to me as “this dumpster fire of a campaign.”
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Ivanka Trump and Her Father
The Third Presidential Debate: Live-Drawing by Jason Adam Katzenstein
What Michael Moore Understands About Hillary Clinton
Iran Is Enjoying Our Presidential Election
The first season of “House of Cards,” the Netflix series about the demonic American politician Frank Underwood and his duplicitous wife, Claire, recently made its début on Iranian television, just in time for the finale of the American elections. The show has been dubbed in Farsi—as “Khaneh Poushaly,” or “House of Straw”—by a state-run television channel. It ran every night for two weeks. The timing seemed deliberate, and authorized from the top: the Islamic Republic vigorously censors most American programs, and the director of Iran’s broadcasting authority, I.R.I.B., is appointed by the Supreme Leader.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Afternoon Cartoon: Tuesday, October 18th
Morning Cartoon: Monday, October 17th
Morning Cartoon: Thursday, October 6th
The Dangers of the Iraqi Coalition Headed Toward Mosul
The last time the Iraqi government launched an offensive to retake a major city from ISIS, in Fallujah, last spring, large groups of Iranian-backed Shiite gunmen joined the attack. By the time it was over, the militias were thought to have carried out hundreds of summary executions of civilians and suspected militants.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:ISIS on the Run
The Real Nuclear Threat
The Coming Crisis in Mosul
October 18, 2016
Top-Down, Bottom-Up Urban Design
About three years ago, the sociologist Richard Sennett asked his friend and colleague Joan Clos, the executive director of the United Nations Human Settlements Program, if he had ever read the Athens Charter, by the architect Le Corbusier. Published in 1943, the charter shaped the design of European and American cities for decades after the Second World War. It presented a set of ninety-four tenets that cities should follow to become functional and efficient. (No. 29: “High-rise apartments placed at wide distances apart liberate ground for large open spaces.”) Clos had indeed read it. “He said he found it a fiction,” Sennett recalled.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Cars vs. Bikes vs. Pedestrians
In Search of the Keys to the Virtual City
How Trees Calm Us Down
Top-Down-Bottom-up Urban Design
About three years ago, the sociologist Richard Sennett asked his friend and colleague Joan Clos, the executive director of the United Nations Human Settlements Program, if he had ever read the Athens Charter, by the architect Le Corbusier. Published in 1943, the charter shaped the design of European and American cities for decades after the Second World War. It presented a set of ninety-four tenets that cities should follow to become functional and efficient. (No. 29: “High-rise apartments placed at wide distances apart liberate ground for large open spaces.”) Clos had indeed read it. “He said he found it a fiction,” Sennett recalled.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Cars vs. Bikes vs. Pedestrians
In Search of the Keys to the Virtual City
How Trees Calm Us Down
Will Donald Trump Cost Republicans the Senate? A State-by-State Guide
With Donald Trump trailing badly in the polls and Election Day approaching, a key question is whether his presence at the top of the Republican ticket will cost the party its majorities in the Senate or the House. If either were to happen, it would transform the prospects for a Hillary Clinton Presidency—and it would also cement Trump’s position as the biggest party wrecker in recent history.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Ivanka Trump and Her Father
The Third Presidential Debate: Live-Drawing by Jason Adam Katzenstein
What Michael Moore Understands About Hillary Clinton
Will Donald Trump Cost Republicans the Senate? A State-By-State Guide
With Donald Trump trailing badly in the polls and Election Day approaching, a key question is whether his presence at the top of the Republican ticket will cost the party its majorities in the Senate or the House. If either were to happen, it would transform the prospects for a Hillary Clinton Presidency—and it would also cement Trump’s position as the biggest party wrecker in recent history.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:What China Sees in Donald Trump—and in Itself
Trump-Pence 2016 Debate-Prep Session
Melania Trump, Conspiracy Theorist
George Packer's Blog
- George Packer's profile
- 481 followers
