George Packer's Blog, page 167

What Is Aleppo, Gary Johnson?

In what universe and era can we be living if Donald Trump is merely the second least informed candidate for the Presidency? Trump foggily negotiated the toothless, pit-a-pat treatment he got from Matt Lauer on NBC last night, insisting once more on his narcissistic admiration for Vladimir Putin: “If he says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him.” But that was nothing new. This morning, on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Mike Barnicle began a roundtable interview with Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate for President and the former governor of New Mexico, that set an even lower marker for ignorance. The following exchange gave one the fleeting impression that, compared to Johnson, Trump is the modern incarnation of Talleyrand:

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Afternoon Cartoon: Thursday, September 8th
What to Make of Military Endorsements
Hillary Clinton’s Patriotism

The Facts and Falsehoods of the Clinton Foundation

If you were to map the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy—the networks of conservative donors, operatives, and journalists whom Hillary Clinton insisted were behind the efforts to bring down her husband’s Administration—you’d have to assign Chris Ruddy a position somewhere within it. Ruddy, who in the nineties was an investigative journalist for the New York Post, wrote two books asking whether the death of the White House aide Vince Foster was an inside job. Ruddy has since become wealthy running Newsmax, a low-brow conservative news Web site and magazine. “Hillary Has Second Coughing Spell of Day During In-Flight Presser,” a recent headline on the site declared. Despite his politics, Ruddy seems to have become personally close with Bill Clinton during the George W. Bush Administration. He has given more than a million dollars to the Clinton Foundation, defended the Foundation on Newsmax last year, and blogged on the Foundation’s Web site in support of anti-malaria efforts in Africa. When Ruddy put Bill Clinton on the cover of his magazine, Clinton gave him an autographed copy, with the note, “I hope this doesn’t destroy your circulation.” All of this has put Ruddy in a strange position in American political life: he is, to use the language of the nineties, at once a certified Friend of Bill’s and a credentialled member of the Conspiracy.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Election Is Still Hillary Clinton’s to Lose
Don DeLillo and Move-In Day
The Trump Immigration Idea That Almost Makes Sense

Trump University: The Scandal That Won’t Go Away

If news cycles were driven by issues of import, rather than what’s new, Trump University, the scandal-plagued learning annex which promised to teach its students Donald Trump’s secrets of how to get rich in real estate, would never leave the front pages and home pages of American media outlets. As I noted in a June post that was based on court documents, even some of Trump University’s own employees regarded it as giant ripoff.  The idea that the proprietor, and principal promoter, of such an enterprise could end up in the Oval Office is absurd on its face.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Afternoon Cartoon: Wednesday, September 7th
Morning Cartoon: Wednesday, September 7th
The Election Is Still Hillary Clinton’s to Lose

Apple Cuts the Cord

The original iPod was a triumph of functional design. No single attribute was a pure breakthrough, but the way the elements all worked together, seamlessly, made the product a hit despite its aggressive price. It helped to reinvent the way we listen to music, and it paved the way for the iPhone. This was a design success that went way beyond aesthetics.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Apple’s Big Problem: Will India Buy iPhones?
Amazing New Features of the iPhone 7
Additional Ethical Questions for Driverless Cars

Apple’s Big Problem: Will India Buy iPhones?

In the future, when we look back on this first Wednesday of September, we might be bewildered that one of the biggest news stories of the day was Apple’s announcement that iPhones will no longer have headphone jacks. It was years ago that Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder and longtime C.E.O., started choreographing the company’s product-launch events as if they were Broadway productions. Back then, Apple’s revelations—the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone—were worthy of spectacle. But does the presentation of a phone that looks like the phones we’re already using, minus a 3.5-millimetre hole, merit such fanfare?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Apple Cuts the Cord
Amazing New Features of the iPhone 7
Sun Wenlin and Hu Mingliang Want to Get Married

The Joyful Approach of Nicolas Mahut, Best Known for a Loss

American tennis fans are likely to think of France’s Nicolas Mahut with a certain wistfulness—the melancolie that attaches, in sport, to any agonizing loss. The loss, in this case, was epic, and if that sounds like a sports cliché, allow me to recall it for you: at Wimbledon, in 2010, Mahut, a twenty-eight-year-old journeyman entering the tournament as a qualifier, played his first-round match against John Isner, who beat him 6–4, 3–6, 6–7 (7), 7–6 (3), 70–68. Those last two numbers are not typos: there are no fifth-set tiebreaks at Wimbledon. The match took eleven hours and five minutes to complete—the longest match in history. It unfolded in the course of three days. I was travelling, and watched various parts of it on TV in my suburban New York bedroom, at Newark airport, in a Hertz office in Fort Lauderdale, and at a South Beach hotel bar, where, as the match was in what turned out to be its final throes, I convinced the server that I would continue to order untouched late-morning drinks if he didn’t switch to World Cup soccer. Mahut won a summer’s worth of games but did not advance to the second round. Tennis does not get more cruel than that.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Happiness of Watching Juan Martín del Potro
The Difference When You Watch Tennis Up Close
The Mysterious Transformation of Angelique Kerber

A Pipeline Fight and America’s Dark Past

This week, thousands of Native Americans, from more than a hundred tribes, have camped out on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, which straddles the border between the Dakotas, along the Missouri River. What began as a slow trickle of people a month ago is now an increasingly angry flood. They’re there to protest plans for a proposed oil pipeline that they say would contaminate the reservation’s water; in fact, they’re calling themselves protectors, not protesters.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Twenty-Five Years After the Failed Soviet Coup
Donald Trump Is the Gift to Hillary Clinton That Keeps On Giving
Thirty Things Donald Trump’s Advisers Managed to Persuade Him Not to Do Last Month

The Happiness of Watching Juan Martín del Potro

Every so often, an athlete has a skill that is so obviously excellent, so justly famous, that it almost becomes a cliché. In tennis, there is Juan Martín del Potro’s forehand. It is such a shorthand for power that it’s easy to overlook that it’s strange. No one else hits anything like it. It is less a swing than a swipe, a slap shot that somehow loses little in accuracy despite its stunning speed. In this age of topspin and defense, the twenty-seven-year-old Argentine hits flat and attacks. He starts with his racquet high—very high; he is six feet six—and then drops the racquet head barely below the ball, so the shot comes off straight and hard. It can almost look like he’s batting the ball down into the opposing court. The motion could look awkward, but del Potro moves with unusual grace for someone his height. He makes hitting a ball hard look very fun.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Difference When You Watch Tennis Up Close
The Mysterious Transformation of Angelique Kerber
Daniel Nestor’s Mastery of Men’s Doubles

The Election Is Still Hillary Clinton’s to Lose

With nine weeks left until the general election, most signs point to a victory for Hillary Clinton. In head-to-head national polling she has been ahead of Donald Trump for much of the past year, and in most recent surveys she has retained the lead. At the state level, too, Clinton holds the advantage: over the summer she moved ahead of Trump in many key battleground states, greatly complicating his path to accumulate two hundred and seventy votes in the Electoral College.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Don DeLillo and Move-In Day
Morning Cartoon: Monday, September 5th

Making Profits on the Captive Prison Market

Earlier this year, I attended a prison trade show in Louisiana, which has the nation’s highest rate of incarceration. Cheery representatives from CrossBar, a Kentucky-based company, demonstrated the bendable electronic cigarettes that are sold in prison commissaries. I chatted with employees of Wallace International, which makes the automated front gates for jails. Sentinel, which makes ankle bracelets to track parolees, distributed slick handouts. A couple hundred more exhibitors were packed into a two-hundred-and-twenty-four-thousand-square-foot space in a New Orleans convention center, a space larger than three professional football fields, including the end zones. It was an education in the scale of the industry of profiting on America’s incarceration system.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why It’s Nearly Impossible for Prisoners to Sue Prisons
A Whistle-Blower Behind Bars
Why Are Educators Learning How to Interrogate Their Students?