George Packer's Blog, page 160

September 25, 2016

Why Ted Cruz Surrendered to Donald Trump

Did Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, wake up on Saturday morning with the quiet satisfaction of knowing that Ted Cruz was finally on his side? Both men have said that they are supporting Donald Trump for President. Cruz took a little longer, and made a bigger production out of it. At the Republican National Convention, in July, he urged delegates to vote according to their “consciences,” and revelled in their boos. The morning after, at a breakfast for the Texas delegation, he said, “I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father”—Trump had done both, implying that he knew secrets about Heidi Cruz and that she was not as attractive as his own wife, and suggesting that Rafael Cruz might have been complicit in the Kennedy assassination. Cruz had added that his pledge, early in the primaries, that he would support the Republican nominee, whoever that might be, did not mean that he would “go like a servile puppy dog.” Instead, apparently, it meant that he would go like a shameless grandstander. On Friday, in a Facebook post, Cruz portrayed his endorsement of Trump as the result of a multi-month struggle, one that involved praying and “searching my conscience.” By that he may have meant searching for his conscience, and, having reassured himself that no such creature was to be found, or at least was not likely to jump out and interfere with his ambitions, he put his name down.

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Published on September 25, 2016 07:30

Will Driverless-Car Makers Learn to Share?

Last Monday, the Obama Administration released a hundred-and-twelve-page policy tome, “Federal Automated Vehicles Policy,” which, despite its sleep-inducing title, found an eager readership. The document contained long-awaited regulatory guidance on self-driving cars—a concept that has gone from sci-fi fantasy to legitimate industry in just a few short years. The official reaction from manufacturers has been muted. Nonetheless, the internal reaction was likely relief. Without federal recognition and regulatory authority, the autonomous-vehicle industry exists in legal limbo. As of Monday, there is a road forward.

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Published on September 25, 2016 06:00

September 24, 2016

Race, Colonialism, and the Netherlands’ Golden Coach

Every year since 1903, on the third Tuesday of September, the Golden Coach—Gouden Koets—has carried the reigning monarchs of the House of Orange from the royal palace to the Dutch parliament for a “throne speech,” an annual assessment of the state of the kingdom. Thousands of jubilant subjects gather to watch the horse-drawn carriage clatter along the leafy streets of The Hague and to catch a glimpse of their beloved monarch. It is known as Prinsjesdag, the day of the little prince.

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Published on September 24, 2016 12:37

September 23, 2016

Trump and the Truth: His Charitable Giving

This essay is part of a series The New Yorker will be running through the election titled “Trump and the Truth.”

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Published on September 23, 2016 21:00

My Vote

I am late weighing in on this election—late in more ways than one. Monday brought my ninety-sixth birthday, and, come November, I will be casting my nineteenth ballot in a Presidential election. My first came in 1944, when I voted for a fourth term for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, my Commander-in-Chief, with a mail-in ballot from the Central Pacific, where I was a sergeant in the Army Air Force. It was a thrilling moment for me, but not as significant as my vote on November 8th this year, the most important one of my lifetime. My country faces a danger unmatched in our history since the Cuban missile crisis, in 1962, or perhaps since 1943, when the Axis powers held most of Continental Europe, and Imperial Japan controlled the Pacific rim, from the Aleutians to the Solomon Islands, with the outcome of that war still unknown.

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Published on September 23, 2016 21:00

A Hack to Yahoo’s Shrunken Reputation

In early August, Vice’s Motherboard site reported that a notorious cybercriminal named Peace had been trying to sell the personal information of hundreds of millions of Yahoo users on the Dark Web. The report came at a painfully awkward time for Yahoo. The company, founded in 1995, had struggled for years to compete against younger, faster-moving Internet companies, and under its latest C.E.O., Marissa Mayer, it had ultimately failed. Just a couple of days before the Motherboard article was published, Verizon had announced that it would acquire Yahoo for nearly five billion dollars—a decent outcome, given the circumstances—but it would be months before the deal closed. Yahoo had already opened an internal investigation into the reported cyber crime. In the end, it found no evidence that Peace was really selling Yahoo users’ information. But the experience, according to a person close to Yahoo, helped spur the company to investigate its records to get a better grasp, in general, of security issues.

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Published on September 23, 2016 16:57

The Limits of Protest in Charlotte

“ ‘Peace’—that language can be tricky,” the Rev. William Barber II said in Charlotte yesterday afternoon. Barber, a big man in his early fifties, is the president of the N.A.A.C.P. in North Carolina, and for the past three years he has been locked in conflict with the state’s Republican governor, Pat McCrory, over voting rights, the minimum wage, and social services for the poor. Barber, whose church is in Goldsboro, a mostly black city about an hour’s drive from Raleigh, had arrived in Charlotte just as the protests over the police killing of Keith Lamont Scott, on Tuesday, grew more intense. He was there in part to observe, but also to make the case that what was happening was not a riot but a protest—that it was mostly controlled, that it had a political history, that the calls for “peace” by those in power were, in fact, just pleas for the protesters to calm themselves without winning any concessions.

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Published on September 23, 2016 16:31

Pakistan’s National Baseball Team Arrives, Improbably, in Brooklyn

When the Pakistani national baseball team arrived in Brooklyn, this week, to play in a qualifying round of the World Baseball Classic, it was the first time in a year that its players had set foot on a regulation baseball diamond. There are no real baseball fields at all in Pakistan, apart from two tucked away at the U.S. Embassy, in Islamabad. To practice in their home country, the team has carved out base paths on a local soccer field and mashed bricks into the earth to simulate the rubber of a pitching mound.

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Published on September 23, 2016 15:51