George Packer's Blog, page 165

Trump and the Truth: Conspiracy Theories

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:
Getting Hillary Clinton to Talk About Her Health
Twenty Science Questions for Donald Trump
Nuclear Lessons for Clinton and Trump from 1949

The Long Defense of the Alabama Death-Row Prisoner Doyle Lee Hamm

On death row at the Donaldson Correctional Facility, in Bessemer, Alabama, Doyle Lee Hamm is known as Pops. He is fifty-nine years old and has been at Donaldson since 1987, when a jury found him guilty of fatally shooting a motel clerk during a robbery. The fact that Hamm has managed to elude execution for nearly three decades can be explained, in large part, by the tenacity of a single person: his attorney, Bernard E. Harcourt. The two met in 1990, soon after Harcourt began working for the lawyer Bryan Stevenson, who at the time had just started an organization in Alabama to defend condemned prisoners. Hamm was one of Harcourt’s first clients.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
There Is No Justice In Killing Dylann Roof
The Supreme Court Gets Ready to Legalize Corruption
A “Wayne’s World” Argument at the Supreme Court

Nuclear Lessons for Clinton and Trump from 1949

On September 23, 1949, a group of White House correspondents was just leaving its usual session with Charles G. Ross, President Harry Truman’s press secretary, when Ross’s secretary told everyone to stick around. The journalists returned to Ross’s office, the door was closed, and Ross handed out copies of a statement by Truman. One reporter scanned it and called out, “Russia has the atomic bomb!” The President’s careful statement did not say that, exactly, but, rather, “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R.” Few, though, doubted that this was the end of the American nuclear monopoly, which had lasted since the Trinity test, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Clinton’s Pneumonia Shakes Up Campaign
Afternoon Cartoon: Monday, September 12th
Morning Cartoon: Monday, September 12th

How Regulation Failed with Wells Fargo

If you Google the phrase “bank cross-selling,” you don’t get many hits about the recent Wells Fargo scandal, in which thousands of bank employees were fired for the most blatant sort of corporate fraud. “Team members,” as Wells Fargo prefers to call its employees, had strict mandates to sign existing customers up for additional products. Someone with a savings account should be convinced to open a checking account, get a credit card, transfer a 401(k), and maybe even take out a mortgage. The sales targets were so high that many employees found them impossible to meet, until someone hit upon an ingenious solution: ignore the customers’ wishes, as well as banking law and basic ethics, and open up new accounts even when the clients had asked them not to. In some cases, customers were charged late fees on accounts they hadn’t requested and that they didn’t know they had.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Wall Street’s Reluctant Embrace of Clinton
Can an Addiction Memoir Help Us Understand Wall Street?
Wall Street Women: Harassed and Power-Hungry

Clinton’s Pneumonia Shakes Up Campaign

What an election this is. On Monday morning, viewers tuning into “Fox & Friends” saw Donald Trump, who has spent months raising bogus concerns about Hillary Clinton’s health, wishing her a speedy recovery from an actual illness: pneumonia. “I just hope she gets well and gets back on the trail and we’ll be seeing her at the debate,” Trump said.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Nuclear Lessons for Clinton and Trump from 1949
Afternoon Cartoon: Monday, September 12th
Morning Cartoon: Monday, September 12th

Wawrinka, Kerber, and Two Highly Rivalrous U.S. Open Finals

Before defeating Novak Djokovic in the U.S. Open final yesterday, Stan Wawrinka felt nervous, “nervous like never before,” he explained after the match. That morning, he had started feeling the pressure building, “the feeling of: you don’t want to lose. I don’t want to come to the court and lose a final. So close, so far.” In the locker room just before the match, sitting with his coach, Magnus Norman, he started to cry. So what did he do? “I had to put my shit together,” he told the press afterward, and he smiled.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Sania Mirza’s Unlikely Stardom
Kei Nishikori’s Pressure-Filled U.S. Open
The Joyful Approach of Nicolas Mahut, Best Known for a Loss

Hillary Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables” Gaffe

One of the pressing questions of the 2016 campaign is: Why are so many Americans supporting Donald Trump? Broadly speaking, there are two competing theories, one cultural and the other economic. According to the first theory, the most powerful force motivating Trump supporters is resentment at the liberal, multicultural society that they see developing around them, a resentment largely rooted in racism. The economic theory, meanwhile, argues that what has turned Trumpism into a mass movement isn’t racism so much as the failure of the American economy to deliver rising living standards for much of the population—particularly the working-class and middle-class white households that prospered during the postwar decades.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Lives of Poor White People
Poll: Unconscious Clinton More Fit to Be President Than Conscious Trump
Trump and the Truth: The Unemployment-Rate Hoax

Less Talk, More Tests from North Korea

The latest country to crash the nuclear club, North Korea, is what the Arms Control Association calls a “nuclear-armed state.” This is a category that includes India, Pakistan, and Israel: countries that have developed nuclear weapons that are not recognized under international law. The arsenals of the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom were effectively legitimized when the Non-Proliferation Treaty took effect, in 1970.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Defector Who Returned to Iran
America at the Atomic Crossroads
The H-Bombs in Turkey

The Endless, and Expensive, Quest for Rare Objects

A few months ago, I was invited to speak at a small marketing conference in Chicago. To attract attendees, its organizer promised everyone a one-ounce pour—a sip, more or less—of a cult bourbon called Pappy Van Winkle. Pappy, as it is known to its fans, is so sought after that it’s nearly impossible to find, and, a few days before the conference, word came that the Pappy supplier had fallen through. Luckily, I happened to walk into a Greenwich Village liquor store where two bottles had just arrived. “They’ll be gone by tomorrow,” the clerk said, before naming his price: thirty-five hundred dollars for the pair. I left with both bottles in a brown paper bag (after, of course, determining that the conference organizers would reimburse me).

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Bonus Daily Cartoon: Pokémon Go Bieber Rescue
Is Pokémon Go’s Success Sustainable?
My Pokémon Go Diary

Trump and the Truth: The Unemployment-Rate Hoax

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:
Elizabeth Warren, Insult Comic
Gary Johnson Vows to Get Tough on East Korea
Afternoon Cartoon: Friday, September 9th