George Packer's Blog, page 169

Brazil After Dilma Rousseff

On Wednesday, thousands of people packed Paulista Avenue, in central São Paulo. Many were there to celebrate the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female President. They posed for photographs while holding plastic champagne flutes and servings of cake with yellow, green, and blue frosting—the colors of the Brazilian flag. Meanwhile, many others had turned out to condemn what they called a golpe: a coup. Earlier in the day, the country’s senators had voted overwhelmingly to remove Rousseff from office, but this apparent consensus belied a deep national rift, and on the street the crowds were bitterly divided. As night fell, lines of riot police separated the opposing groups, and officers used tear gas to disperse anti-impeachment demonstrators.

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Brazil’s Olympics Meet Its Favelas
The Paradox of Brazil and Its Olympiad
New Events for the 2016 Rio Olympics

Extreme Trump, from Mexico to Phoenix

“I just landed, having returned from a very important and special meeting with the President of Mexico,” Donald Trump told a crowd in Phoenix, Arizona, on Wednesday night, as he began what he promised would be a very important and special policy address on illegal immigration. He said he’d liked his host, President Enrique Peña Nieto, “a man who truly loves his country—Mexico.” Trump pronounced the name of that country as if the object of Peña Nieto’s affection might not be obvious to his audience, and then added, “And, by the way, just like I am a man who loves my country—the United States.” Trump gave the cheers that followed a double thumbs-up and an asymmetrical smile. As political odysseys go, Trump’s hop over to Mexico didn’t add up to much of a journey, in terms of political risk or philosophical or even rhetorical evolution; neither did his speech, which mostly repeated his warnings about how Hillary Clinton and her ilk had handed over innocent Americans to murderous illegal immigrants for their own corrupt purposes. Any late-hour hopes anyone might have harbored for anything very different—outreach to Hispanic Americans that went beyond vague protestations of Trumpian love, for example—would have wilted in the Phoenix night. But Trump himself was having, by his measure, a pretty good day.

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Related:
Trump Chooses the Alt-Right Over the R.N.C.
Teflon Don: Revisiting Trump’s Early Fans
Trump, the University of Chicago, and the Collapse of Public Language

What Litigation Finance Is Really About

Twice a year, Y Combinator, a startup accelerator based in Mountain View, California, holds what it calls a Demo Day, which is a showcase of the latest batch of new companies it has nurtured. In the past, those have included Dropbox, Airbnb, and Reddit (as well as a number of companies no one remembers). Last week, at the most recent Demo Day, Eva Shang took to the stage to talk about her startup, Legalist.

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Gawker’s Essential Unevenness
Peter Thiel’s Conservative Vision
Gawker Was a Great Place to Become a Journalist

How Apple Helped Create Ireland’s Economies, Real and Fantastical

There are two equally valid, yet seemingly incompatible, ways of viewing Apple Computer’s relationship with Ireland. The first way, which is the one that Apple and the Irish government prefer, is embodied in the Apple campus that sits near the corner of Harbour View Road and Ardcullen, in the Holyhill Industrial Estate, not far from the center of Cork. The buildings are filled with employees doing meaningful work. There is a small manufacturing operation, the only factory actually owned by Apple, assembling iMacs. There is a logistics operation, serving Apple Stores all over Europe. There are marketing people and technical-support pros, able to solve problems in nearly every European language. Apple first came to Cork in 1980, when Ireland was still a barely developed agrarian country, hemorrhaging ambitious citizens to London, Paris, and New York. This version of Apple, the physical one, deserves no small bit of credit for helping to give birth to the Celtic Tiger, the transformation of northern Europe’s most miserable economy into a prosperous center of finance, manufacturing, and high technology.

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Fulbright Proposal for Getting Away from New York Boys
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Was Steve Jobs an Artist?

Does Anyone in Syria Fear International Law?

The horror of Syria’s war is in the millions of pictures that are too gruesome to circulate—charred limbs stacked outside hospital wards, bloated bodies rotting in sniper alleys, a toddler plucked from the rubble without a head. It is in a group of relatives trying to carry the sixty-pound corpse of a man who died of hunger—the boiled grass he’d been living on could no longer sustain him—but struggling under his weight, because they, too, are starving to death. It is in a generation of orphans, of children who never learned to read but can tell you the difference between the sounds of shelling and those of air strikes. It is in the intentional bombing of hospitals and clinics, the targeted assassinations of medical workers, the forced displacements, the chemical-weapons attacks. It is in a death toll so high, and so impossible to verify, that the U.N. stopped counting two years ago.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Babies Are Dying in Aleppo
The Refugee Olympians in Rio
Who Bombed the Istanbul Airport?

The Trumping of Darrell Issa

On May 12th, while Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, and the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, met at R.N.C. headquarters, in Washington, Representative Darrell Issa tried to figure out how to leave the building. The sidewalk in front was blocked by protesters and reporters, and Issa, who had recently endorsed Trump, expected to be harassed by them. “I wish you had a back door,” Issa said, according to a reporter inside who overheard the remark.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Morning Cartoon: Wednesday, August 31st
Obama Pays Mexico Five Billion Dollars to Keep Donald Trump
Afternoon Cartoon: Tuesday, August 30th

Graduate Students, the Laborers of Academia

Twenty years ago, when I was a senior at Yale, the graduate students embarked on a two-week “grade strike,” during which they refused to hand in the fall grades of the undergraduates they were teaching. Grades were due on January 2, 1996, but the grad students, then as now agitating for union recognition, withheld the grades until two weeks later, when it became clear that they were losing the battle on all fronts. The dean of the graduate school brought three union leaders up on disciplinary charges (one was dismissed, though the other two had their punishments overturned); some faculty members threatened graduate students with reprisals, like poor letters of recommendation; and the Yale undergraduates, for whom a transcript without grades was like a scull without oarsmen, turned viciously on their teaching assistants.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The American Fugitives of Havana

When a cold war winds down, what happens to its spies and traitors? The British double agents Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean were able to see out their days in Moscow while it was still ruled by Communists, without fears that their hosts might betray them and send them back to an unforgiving Great Britain.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Ninety Years of Fidel Castro
Vital Rituals of the Afro-Cuban Underground
Fidel Speaks, and Raúl Stays on, in Cuba

Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the Voice of ISIS, Is Dead

Two years ago, the United States put a five-million-dollar bounty on the head of Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, the chief propagandist and strategist of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. He had used some of the most repugnant language to come out of the jihadi caliphate. In September, 2014, after the Obama Administration mobilized a coalition to conduct air strikes against ISIS, Adnani responded with a long and rambling challenge:

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Trump’s Blunt-Force Foreign Policy
The Grinding Fight to Root Out ISIS in a Battered Libya
The Tragic and Unsurprising News from Nice

Politics and a Jittery Nation

Labor Day was once a significant date in American politics—the traditional kickoff of Presidential campaigns, the Monday when, in 1960, John F. Kennedy, the Democratic candidate, gave his first campaign speech, in Detroit, in Cadillac Square, appealing to the working men and women for whom Labor Day was invented. If that’s now an antique notion in an age when campaigns are constant, this year’s holiday is likely to mark a time for more venom, and remind us that the most distressing contest in memory will go on for another two months.

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Donald J. Trump’s Extended Health Assessment, the Ten-Minute Version
The Challenge of Rebranding Donald Trump