George Packer's Blog, page 168

The Difference When You Watch Tennis Up Close

The size of a baseball park changes the way the game is played. If a hitter comes to bat at Boston’s Fenway Park, he may look to pull pitches toward the big wall in left field, which is only three hundred and ten feet or so from home plate. At Yankee Stadium, he might aim for the short porch in right field. This, in turn, affects the pitcher’s choice of what he plans to throw, and where—which affects how the infielders and outfielders position themselves. But the size of a given major-league park will change your experience of watching baseball only a little, especially nowadays, with nearly all the big stadiums built in the nineteen-sixties and seventies getting replaced by fan-friendly, retro-modern parks.

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Related:
The Mysterious Transformation of Angelique Kerber
Daniel Nestor’s Mastery of Men’s Doubles
American Tennis in Black and White

The Trump Immigration Idea That Almost Makes Sense

Toward the end of Donald Trump’s rant in Arizona the other night, down at point No. 10 of his ten-point plan to make life awful for immigrants, I found myself jerking backward, surprised, not by the ugly misrepresentations or barely concealed racism—who could be surprised by that anymore?—but by the shock that there was something in the speech that seemed to possibly make a little bit of sense. It was this: he called for the creation of “a new immigration commission . . . to select immigrants based on their likelihood of success in U.S. society, and their ability to be financially self-sufficient. . . . To choose immigrants based on merit, skill, and proficiency.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump and the Truth: Immigration and Crime
Afternoon Cartoon: Friday, September 2nd
Trump Chooses the Alt-Right Over the R.N.C.

The Mysterious Transformation of Angelique Kerber

By the time Angelique Kerber played Victória Azárenka in Doha in February, 2015, her career was in trouble. Kerber, who had finished 2014 ranked ninth in the world, had lost in the first round of the Australian Open, lost playing the annual team Fed Cup, lost in Dubai. After losing earlier that month, in Antwerp, to Francesca Schiavone, who was long past her Grand Slam-winning days, the German had dropped out of the top ten. It seemed only a matter of time before she was out of the top twenty.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daniel Nestor’s Mastery of Men’s Doubles
American Tennis in Black and White
Serena Williams, Andy Murray, and a Political Wimbledon

The Public Trial of Nate Parker

A poster for Nate Parker’s new film, “The Birth of a Nation,” to be released in October, shows a photo of Parker’s head hoisted in a noose fashioned out of a twisted-up American flag. Parker stars in, wrote, produced, and directed the film, which tells the story of Nat Turner’s life and the slave rebellion he led in 1831. The title is appropriated from the famous 1915 silent film of the same name, which is set during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and in which black men (often played by white actors in blackface) are portrayed as wanting to sexually coerce white women. Parker counters this fantasy by showing an act of sexual violence against a black woman by white men. In his film, the revolt is partly inspired by a gang rape of Turner’s wife.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Amy Schumer’s New Obligations
A Five-Hour Japanese Film Captures the Agonizing Intimacies of Daily Life
Los Porkys: The Sexual-Assault Case That’s Shaking Mexico

Sun Wenlin and Hu Mingliang Want to Get Married

Like so many young people today in China, the two men met online. According to Sun Wenlin, a tech consultant and, at age twenty-six, the younger of the pair, it had been “love at first sight.” Hu Mingliang, who is thirty-seven years old and the more reticent of the two, works as a security guard. In June, 2015, on the first anniversary of the day they met, they walked to the local civil-affairs bureau to apply for a marriage license. They were turned away, but, unlike the tens of millions of Chinese who have resigned themselves to sexual identities unrecognized by the state, Sun decided to file a lawsuit. It was the first of its kind in China, and asked for the legalization of same-sex marriage. The case was rejected by the court, but not before garnering attention and support from around the world. Sun and Hu’s open appeal to the legal system was indisputably a step forward for L.G.B.T.Q. rights and a testament to their commitment to each other. And yet the two men—one from the country, one from the city—had taken somewhat different journeys, shaped not only by the contradictions of the country today but by the long history of homosexuality in China.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Fu Yuanhui Teaches China to Relax at the Olympics
A Cartoonist Travels in China: Xiamen and Leaving China
A Cartoonist Travels in China: Changsha

Introducing a New Series: Trump and the Truth

Presidents lie, and their lies all too often end in disillusion, prosecution, or blood. To skim the greatest hits of American fabrication from the Oval Office is to shudder at the shameless gall of the speakers:

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Related:
The Trump Immigration Idea That Almost Makes Sense
What the SpaceX Explosion Means for Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg
The Mysterious Transformation of Angelique Kerber

Trump and the Truth: Immigration and Crime

“The facts aren’t known because the media won’t report on them,” Donald Trump declared during his immigration speech in Phoenix on Wednesday. A few hours earlier, the Republican nominee had been in Mexico City, where he had held a joint press conference with the Mexican President, Enrique Peña Nieto, and lauded Mexican-Americans as “amazing people . . . just beyond reproach.” In Phoenix, flanked by American flags, he struck a different tone. Trump warned the crowd that if Clinton were elected, America would be inundated by a new wave of illegal immigration that would result in “thousands of more violent, horrible crimes, and total chaos and lawlessness.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Trump Immigration Idea That Almost Makes Sense
Afternoon Cartoon: Friday, September 2nd
Trump Chooses the Alt-Right Over the R.N.C.

The Mania of Michigan Football

Michigan football fans are fanatical about their college team. It bonds almost anyone, anywhere, automatically. In 1975, I moved to Mozambique, then a scenic colony on the Indian Ocean, where a ten-year guerilla war was ending a half millennium of Portuguese rule and, in turn, igniting challenges to white-minority regimes across southern Africa. It was a historic time, and I needed a telephone to report on it. Impossible, the post, telephone, and telegraph agency told me—the waiting list was nine years long. I worked through layers of bureaucracy at its headquarters—pleading, cajoling, pressing, and flirting—until I found someone who spoke English with an American accent. He, too, said no. I was about to leave his office when, in one last stab, I noted his accent and asked where he had learned English. “The University of Michigan,” he said. Bingo. I told him I was an Ann Arbor girl, born, raised, and educated.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Bible of Texas Football
A New Twist in the Penn State Case
Comment Podcast: Team Spirit

Trump Chooses the Alt-Right Over the R.N.C.

On August 20th, the Republican National Committee sent out a press release announcing that Donald Trump would be meeting with a recently formed “National Hispanic Advisory Council for Trump.” The Republican Presidential nominee has fared so poorly in the Hispanic community that G.O.P. ads targeting Hispanic voters use the tagline “Sí, yo estoy con Trump” (Yes, I’m with Trump), an apparent nod to the shock of Hispanics revealing their preference for a candidate who has described Mexican immigrants as “rapists”; banned Univision, the largest Spanish-language television network, from covering his events; and claimed that a federal judge of Mexican descent could not fairly preside over a fraud case against him.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Teflon Don: Revisiting Trump’s Early Fans
Trump, the University of Chicago, and the Collapse of Public Language
Mexican President Says He Made Trump Pay for Lunch

Teflon Don: Revisiting Trump’s Early Fans

A year ago, in the final days of summer, I wrote about Donald Trump’s emerging candidacy, which was settling into a new phase as a durable and somewhat mystifying success. Trump supporters in half a dozen states told me about the various reasons he appealed to them: their overpowering frustration with Washington élites, their despair over declining economic opportunity, and, in some cases, their fear of illegal immigrants and of African-Americans.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump Chooses the Alt-Right Over the R.N.C.
Trump, the University of Chicago, and the Collapse of Public Language
Mexican President Says He Made Trump Pay for Lunch