George Packer's Blog, page 152

The N.B.A.’s New Brand of Activism

Last month, as an increasing number of professional athletes followed the lead of Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback, by sitting or kneeling during the national anthem, the National Basketball Association and the National Basketball Players Association together issued a memo to the league’s players, soliciting ideas for creating “positive change.” The memo informed players that the league and the union were working together to formulate their own suggestions. “These ideas are based on the actions many of you have already taken or supported,” the memo read, “including convening community conversations in NBA markets to engage young people, parents, community leaders and law enforcement in a candid dialogue.”

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The Misunderstanding of J. R. Smith
Festival Spotlight: Start the Linsanity!
The Desegregation and Resegregation of Charlotte’s Schools

What “Divorce” Understands About Marriage

Last year, in holding that states must allow gay and straight couples alike to enter civil marriage, the Supreme Court extolled the “transcendent importance of marriage,” its beauty, nobility, and dignity. That was the fulsome culmination of the decades that led to marriage equality. But, just as two people must enter marriage with the law’s blessing, they need the law in order to exit it. As legal marriage is now universally available, so, too, is legal divorce.

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Celebrity Reactions to the Brangelina Divorce
The End of Brangelina and the Rise of Acteurism
This Week in Fiction: Tessa Hadley on Fiction as Anthropology

Putin, Syria, and Why Moscow Has Gone War-Crazy

A viewer of Russian television this week could be forgiven for thinking that the end of the world was imminent, and that it would arrive in the form of grand superpower war with the United States, culminating in a suicidal exchange of nuclear weapons. On one day alone, three separate test firings of intercontinental ballistic missiles were broadcast on state media: two by submarine, one from a launch pad in the Far East. Last weekend, NTV, a channel under effective state control, aired a segment on emergency preparedness that included a tour of a Cold War-era bomb shelter, fortified in case of atomic war, and a mention of the municipal loudspeakers that will sound upon the arrival of “Hour X.” On Sunday, Dmitry Kiselev, the most bombastic and colorful of Kremlin propagandists, warned on his weekly newsmagazine show that “impudent behavior” toward Russia may have “nuclear” consequences.

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Related:
Paul Ryan’s Struggle with Trump—and Trump’s Voters
A Modest Proposal for an Immodest Campaign
The Election May Be Over, but Trump’s Blowup Is Just Starting

A Homemade Museum for Yemeni Refugees in Djibouti

The desert plain between the Gulf of Aden and the Mabla Mountains, in northern Djibouti, is a rutted landscape of ochre sand and rocks, dotted with gnarled acacia trees. In summer, it is swept by dust storms with wind speeds as high as forty miles an hour, known as the khamsin, and temperatures can top a hundred and twenty degrees. Here, in a refugee camp called Markazi, near the town of Obock, around a thousand Yemenis, who fled civil war in their country, are housed in a cluster of tents and white huts, surrounded by a chain-link fence. There used to be more than three thousand, but many have left, renting rooms in Djibouti City, if they can afford them, or returning to Yemen, preferring the uncertainty of a war zone to the heat of the camp.

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Related:
Taryn Simon’s Varieties of Mourning
This Week in Fiction: Robert Coover on How Real Events Can Color Fiction

Paul Ryan’s Struggle with Trump—and Trump’s Voters

Paul Ryan and Donald Trump, at the moment the two major figures in the Republican Party, plainly detest each another. Ryan, the Speaker of the House, has spent the Presidential campaign trying to advertise both a personal and ideological repugnance toward Trump and a commitment to the Party’s nominee. On Monday, after the Trump “Access Hollywood” video was released, and John McCain and other prominent Republicans renounced the candidate, Ryan more or less gave up, telling House Republicans on a conference call that, though he was not pulling his endorsement, he would no longer defend or campaign for the Presidential nominee.

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Related:
Putin, Syria, and Why Moscow Has Gone War-Crazy
Trump Warns Hillary May Rig Election by Getting More Votes
Morning Cartoon: Friday, October 14th

Twitter Has Never Been Stronger—or Weaker

If you listen to the financial news, and the financial markets, Twitter is floundering. The company is actively shopping itself to deep-pocketed buyers in hopes of ending the cycle of raised expectations and dashed hopes that has characterized its relationship with Wall Street. But a number of those potential buyers, including Disney and Microsoft, have already passed, and Salesforce.com just told the Financial Times, “We’ve walked away.” The uncertainty about Twitter’s future has made the company’s share price as volatile over the past couple of weeks as a penny stock’s, and has raised questions about the company’s future if no sale materializes.

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Morning Cartoon: Wednesday, October 12th
Workplace by Facebook, or a Party in the Office
Yelling at Amazon’s Alexa

A Modest Proposal for an Immodest Campaign

[1] It is a melancholy Object, to those who watch the great Networks or troll YouTube or even just occasionally glance at the Times, to hear talk of “revolution” from those who advocate “law and order” or to see men with the word “Trump” tattooed across their bald pates. Similarly dismaying, when travelling the byways of the Web, is to encounter the following statistic: according to the latest Quinnipiac University national poll, among men Donald Trump leads Hillary Clinton by twelve percentage points. According to the latest Fox News poll, men favor Trump by nine points. As FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver put it in a post on Tuesday, “If men were the only voters . . . we’d have to subtract 10 points from Clinton’s current margin in every state—which would yield an awfully red map . . . 350 electoral votes for Trump to 188 for Clinton.”

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The Election May Be Over, but Trump’s Blowup Is Just Starting
Michelle Obama Takes on Donald Trump
Bob Dylan’s Nobel Triumph in a Time of Trump

The Election May Be Over, but Trump’s Blowup Is Just Starting

Is the Presidential election done? On Thursday morning, Donald Trump, facing new sexual-assault accusations, cancelled an interview with one of his most stalwart supporters, Sean Hannity, of Fox News. Other news networks reported that they were having a hard time finding guests willing to defend Trump on air. Some commentators went as far as suggesting that Trump might skip the third Presidential debate, which is scheduled for Wednesday, or maybe even drop out of the race entirely.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Modest Proposal for an Immodest Campaign
Michelle Obama Takes on Donald Trump
Bob Dylan’s Nobel Triumph in a Time of Trump

Michelle Obama Takes on Donald Trump

“I know it’s a campaign, but this isn’t about politics,” Michelle Obama said in a speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Thursday afternoon, as she responded to the latest news of Donald Trump’s treatment of women. “It’s about basic human decency. It’s about right and wrong.” She spoke with a passion that many feel, but few can deploy with such controlled, incisive force. And yet her speech was very much about politics—politics as the enterprise that the sordidness of this election may lead many to give up on, politics as a national inheritance, and politics as an ethical choice.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Modest Proposal for an Immodest Campaign
The Election May Be Over, but Trump’s Blowup Is Just Starting
Bob Dylan’s Nobel Triumph in a Time of Trump

A Win in the Ground War Against Elephant Poachers in Africa

Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, in northern Republic of Congo, consists of sixteen hundred square miles of Central African rain forest and is jointly administered by the Congolese ministry of forests and the Wildlife Conservation Society, of the Bronx. Lying just east of the Sangha River, the park is home to significant populations of western lowland gorillas, chimpanzees, giant forest hogs, and, above all, to some five thousand forest elephants. Like elephants everywhere in Africa, those in the park are, increasingly, under siege. Two years ago, when I visited,  the park’s technical adviser, Tomo Nishihara, told me that the numbers of elephants in the park and its surrounding buffer zones had fallen from ten thousand to five thousand in just five years. “That gives us five more years before they’re gone,” he said.

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Could Genetically Modified Mosquitoes Save Hawaii’s Endangered Birds?
The Dangerous Route of Ethiopian Migrants
An E-Commerce Challenge in Africa: Selling to People Who Aren’t Online