George Packer's Blog, page 162

Tony Blair Praises Hillary Clinton and Issues an Appeal to Americans

In the fall of 1999, at 10 Downing Street, I interviewed Tony Blair, who was midway through the first of his three terms as Britain’s Prime Minister. Apart from his insistence that old-style socialism was dead—a sacrilegious statement for many members of his Labour Party—what I recall most vividly was Blair’s physical presence: the intensity, the flashing eyes, the gesticulating, the articulateness. Trained as a barrister, Blair had the bearing and mannerisms of the smartest young advocate in the chambers.

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Arlie Russell Hochschild’s View of Small-Town Decay and Support for Trump
Afternoon Cartoon: Tuesday, September 20th
Trump and the Truth: The “Mexican” Judge

New York’s Rational Response to Terror

The bombings that took place in Chelsea and New Jersey over the weekend managed to be both frightening and, in a strange way, inspiring. They were frightening, obviously, because they reminded us that, given the realities of modern technology and its dissemination of information, we can never hope to be entirely safe against the threat of terrorism. Whether or not the suspected bomber had a direct relationship with ISIS or other foreign groups, or, as so often now, an indirect one, or none at all, information about how to construct bombs is now so widely available that it is impossible to build complete immunity against terrorism, certainly not in anything still resembling an open society. For all the ingenuity and obvious efficiency of the New York Police Department and its fellows—qualities that have made terrorism in the city since 9/11 far more infrequent than anyone might have imagined in those panicky days and months after it—there is no such thing as no risk. There will be more bombings, and there will be other bombers.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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A New Terror-Alert System
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Arlie Russell Hochschild’s View of Small-Town Decay and Support for Trump

Kevin Thompson, a police officer in East Liverpool, Ohio, a town on the West Virginia border, was driving along St. Clair Avenue on September 7th when he noticed a Ford Explorer veering between the road and the shoulder. Thompson followed. Up ahead, a school bus was discharging students, and the driver of the Explorer seemed slow to notice this; he had to brake sharply, and then he started drifting into oncoming traffic, before coming to a stop. Thompson parked his car and walked over. Both the driver, a forty-seven-year-old man named James Acord, and his passenger, a fifty-year-old woman named Rhonda Pasek, looked as if they were high. Thompson wrote in his police report, “I noticed his head was bobbing back and forth and his speech was almost unintelligible.” Acord tried to put the car in gear to drive away; Thompson had to turn off the ignition and take away the keys. Eventually, both Acord and Pasek passed out. In police photographs of the scene, Acord’s mouth is open and his chin is up in the air; Pasek is slumped over to her left. What made the photographs go viral, what made them part of the iconography of the opiate epidemic, was the presence in the back seat of an alert four-year-old boy.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Tony Blair Praises Hillary Clinton and Issues an Appeal to Americans
Afternoon Cartoon: Tuesday, September 20th
Trump and the Truth: The “Mexican” Judge

Trump and the Truth: The “Mexican” Judge

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

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Tony Blair Praises Hillary Clinton and Issues an Appeal to Americans
Arlie Russell Hochschild’s View of Small-Town Decay and Support for Trump
Afternoon Cartoon: Tuesday, September 20th

Trump Is Still Lying About Birtherism

On Sunday, Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union,” saying things that weren’t true about Donald Trump’s birtherist lies. “After the President presented his birth certificate, Donald has said, ‘You know, he was born in the United States and that’s the end of the issue.’ It was a contentious issue,” Christie said. Jake Tapper, the host, corrected him. “As a point of fact, Donald Trump did not accept when Barack Obama released his birth certificate in 2011. He kept up this whole birther thing until Friday.” Tapper was right to call Christie on that falsehood; some of Trump’s lowest insinuations about the President’s citizenship have occurred not only in the past few years but in recent months. Efforts to deal with that fallacy, however, have somehow, in the past few days, allowed another Trump lie to solidify: the idea that the President somehow didn’t release his birth certificate until 2011. In fact, Obama released his birth certificate in June, 2008. His campaign posted it online. Reporters were allowed to hold it and examine its embossed state seal and signature stamp. It showed that he had been born in Honolulu, on August 4, 1961, at 7:24 P.M. Hawaiian officials attested to its accuracy. That there were any questions after that point is, in itself, a scandal. Indeed, that there were any questions before that point is outrageous. Candidates who say that they were born in the United States are generally not faced with nervous glances and requests to prove it. But Obama was, and, in 2008, he did prove it.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Tony Blair Praises Hillary Clinton and Issues an Appeal to Americans
Arlie Russell Hochschild’s View of Small-Town Decay and Support for Trump
Afternoon Cartoon: Tuesday, September 20th

Solving Chicago’s Murders Could Prevent More

On August 26th, at 3:30 in the afternoon, Nykea Aldridge was pushing her month-old daughter in a baby stroller in a neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side when two men began shooting at a man getting out of a car. Some of their bullets missed their target and hit Aldridge in the arm and in the head. Aldridge, who was thirty-two years old and a mother of four, had been walking from a school where she had just registered her older children. She died forty-five minutes later in the hospital. Two things made Aldridge’s death different from most of the five hundred and nine fatal shootings that have occurred so far this year in Chicago: it received national attention because Aldridge’s cousin is the basketball star Dwyane Wade, and within forty-eight hours the police announced that they had arrested two suspects—two brothers—for the murder.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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A New Terror-Alert System

Just before 8 A.M. on Monday morning, New Yorkers got a message on their mobile phones: “WANTED: Ahmad Khan Rahami, 28-yr-old male. See media for pic. Call 9-1-1 if seen.” The news came through the same emergency-alert system, with its disorienting buzz, that government agencies use to send news of a flood, and so it suggested some uncanny Pynchonian transference, in which terrorism had become as mundane and as universally affecting as the atmosphere. By eleven-thirty, the alert had made a “significant contribution,” as Mayor Bill de Blasio put it at a lunchtime news conference, to the capture of Rahami, who was found sleeping in the doorway of a bar in his home town of Linden, New Jersey. The alert, de Blasio said, had an “extraordinary effect.” His new police commissioner, James O’Neill, called it the “future.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Arrest of Ahmad Khan Rahami

Ahmad Khan Rahami, a man sought by thousands of law-enforcement officers, spent at least part of Monday morning asleep in the doorway of a bar in Linden, New Jersey. He was spotted by the bar owner, who, thinking that Rahami was yet another vagrant, called the police. The first officer on the scene immediately recognized Rahami as the man suspected of planting bombs in Manhattan and northern New Jersey on Saturday and Sunday.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Birtherism, Bombs, and Donald Trump’s Weekend

It’s been a whirlwind ninety-six hours, Chuck Todd, the host of NBC’s “Meet the Press,” noted during Sunday’s program. But, he added, “that’s pretty much the description you can do for any ninety-six hours during this campaign.” It was hard to argue with him. One of the difficulties of analyzing this election has been in disentangling the daily news, which has seldom failed to shock, from the larger forces driving the contest.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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A Persnickety Spy for Luxury Hotels

On a recent Wednesday evening, Ann, a fifty-three-year-old securities lawyer who lives in Manhattan, checked into Room 310 at a swanky hotel in midtown. (Average nightly rate: four hundred and twenty-eight dollars.) She dropped her purse in the corner and headed straight for the bathroom, where she gripped the sides of the toilet and peered inside. “It checks out,” she said. Back in the room, she sat down on the bed and ran her hands across the dark-gray velvet headboard, which complemented the light-gray velvet comforter. She leaned back slowly on four large, white pillows and bounced up and down a few times. “Firm, but not crazy-firm.” This seemed to satisfy her. Getting up, she stood by the side of the bed, then dropped to her hands and knees. She lifted the sheets and looked under the mattress. “Is that a hair?” she asked, extracting one from the underside of the mattress. She whipped out a notepad and started scribbling.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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