George Packer's Blog, page 173

The Mystery of Ryan Lochte

In the spring of 2013, the swimmer Ryan Lochte starred in a short-lived reality show called “What Would Ryan Lochte Do?” The show was peppered with Lochte’s catchphrase—“Jeah”—and in each episode he confronted a different niche dilemma. For instance, in the first season’s finale, “What Would Ryan Lochte Do—on Spring Break?” The show was cancelled after one season, due to poor ratings, but, in the past week, the world has been plunged into a real-life reboot: “What Would Ryan Lochte Do—If He Got Mugged at the Olympics?”

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Related:
How to Save Olympic Track for Its Fans
Life After Usain Bolt
Daily Cartoon: Friday, August 19th

Life After Usain Bolt

Last summer, I went to a nondescript conference room in a midtown Manhattan hotel to see Usain Bolt. He was racing that week at a Diamond League meet on Randall’s Island, on the same track where, six years earlier, he had set the world record in the hundred metres with an electric run. At the press conference, Bolt was, as ever, relaxed and loose. He was feeling good, he said. He was already looking ahead to the two hundred metres in Rio. “I really want to get to sub-nineteen seconds,” he said, “and [win] the Olympics three times.” As he left the podium, the members of the media applauded. He paused, turned around, picked up the microphone again, and told the press to clap louder. Everyone laughed and applauded again.

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Related:
How to Save Olympic Track for Its Fans
The Mystery of Ryan Lochte
Ryan Lochte’s Perfect Summer Scandal

Fox News and the Repercussions of Sexual Harassment

One of the surprising things about the Fox News sexual-harassment story is that the women who have come forward with allegations include several of the network’s better-known anchors and reporters. You might think that professional power could stave off the kind of spin-around-and-let-me-see-your-ass leering and straight-up demands for sex that Gretchen Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and others say they endured from former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes and other male supervisors. (Ailes and his lawyer, Susan Estrich, continue to deny the allegations.) But that does not seem to have been the case.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Are Donald Trump, Roger Ailes, and Steve Bannon Really Up To?
The Cracked Integrity of Donald Trump
Ivanka Trump and the Question of Sexual Harassment

What Are Donald Trump, Roger Ailes, and Steve Bannon Really Up To?

What better way to mark the news that the head of Breitbart.com, the alt-right news site, is now running Donald Trump’s campaign than with a conspiracy theory? And, unlike some of the conspiracy theories that appear on Breitbart, this one might actually be true.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Fox News and the Repercussions of Sexual Harassment
A Year Without Oliver Sacks
What Do People Mean When They Say Donald Trump Is Racist?

Why Brazilians Are So Obsessed with the Ryan Lochte Story

The 2016 Olympics have exposed to the world sides of Rio de Janeiro that most Brazilians would have preferred to keep out of sight. Raw sewage running into waterways. Chunks of concrete falling from the ceiling of a newly built tunnel. Stray bullets flying through the air. Not to mention that pesky foreign reporters keep venturing into the city’s favelas, where conflicts between drug gangs and security forces continue to simmer.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Ryan Lochte’s Perfect Summer Scandal
Clearing the Bar: The Philosophy of the High Jump
The Beauty of Shaunae Miller’s Ugly Dive in Rio

What Do People Mean When They Say Donald Trump Is Racist?

If you visited the Drudge Report on Tuesday, you might have noticed that the top story was a countdown to a confrontation. The headline read, “TONIGHT: TRUMP TAKES ON THE RIOTERS! LIVE FROM MILWAUKEE.” Donald Trump is, after all, a “law and order” Presidential candidate—he used the phrase in one of the first sentences of his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. And Milwaukee had been unsettled in the wake of the police killing, on Saturday afternoon, of an African-American man named Sylville K. Smith; protests and violence followed, some of it racially charged. A video journalist named Tim Pool reported hearing shouts of “Fuck white people,” and mentioned a “white kid” who had been shot in the neck; Pool said, “For those that are perceivably white, it is just not safe to be here.” Many Drudge readers might have expected that Trump—sworn enemy of political correctness, and frequent transgressor of political norms—would be ready for a fight.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Are Donald Trump, Roger Ailes, and Steve Bannon Really Up To?
A Year Without Oliver Sacks
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, August 18th

Poor and Uninsured in Texas

Geronimo Oregón was wheeled out of the intensive-care unit at Houston’s Ben Taub Hospital on April 17, 2016, his body wired with electrodes and his mother at his side. He had arrived in the emergency room six days earlier, complaining of confusion, stomach pain, and shortness of breath. Physicians had drained nearly half a gallon of fluid from around his right lung, corrected his sodium imbalance (a cause of his confusion), and relieved the worst of his pain. Now Oregón was being transferred to the step-down unit, a kind of limbo between the I.C.U. and the general ward. His new room had a vacuum pump on the wall. When the suction was on, a bright yellow fluid drained out of a tube in his nose and into a clear cannister. Every part of his body—his belly, his face, his eyes—was the same vivid shade. He had jaundice, the result of old red blood cells leaking into his tissues rather than being cleared from his body as waste. In medicine, this is known as a stigmata, a physical mark of illness. Oregón was dying of liver failure. A calculation made using his blood work showed that, unless he received a liver transplant, he had only an eighteen per cent chance of surviving the next ninety days.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The New Obamacare Economy
Remembering Sandra Bland’s Death in the Place I Call Home
The Supreme Court’s Just Application of the Undue-Burden Standard for Abortion

An Infrastructure Proposal That Goes Beyond Clinton and Trump

If you’re despairing at this year’s Presidential election, here’s something encouraging to focus on: both candidates are proposing to increase infrastructure spending. Hillary Clinton has published a five-year plan that would cost two hundred and seventy-five billion dollars. Donald Trump has also come out in favor of infrastructure investments. Earlier this month, he was asked about Clinton’s proposals, and how much he would spend. He said, “I would say at least double her numbers, and you’re going to really need more than that.”

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Related:
Song of the Summer: “Bawitdaba,” by Kid Rock
The Cracked Integrity of Donald Trump
Donald Trump in Denmark

Should the U.S. Still Be Sending Military Aid to Honduras?

When the activist Berta Cáceres was assassinated in Honduras, in March, the news was devastating but not exactly surprising. Honduras has one of the world’s highest murder rates, and social activists are frequently targets—more than a hundred have been killed in the country since 2010. Cáceres, though, was someone with a significant international reputation. Ever since she won the Goldman Prize, a high-profile environmental award, in 2015, many had assumed that her prominence gave her a degree of protection. The fact that it didn’t—that her killers didn’t care about any potential fallout from her murder—was a reminder of the staggering impunity afforded to criminals in a country where ninety-eight per cent of crimes go unsolved. In the five months since Cáceres’s murder, two more members of the group that she led, the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), have been killed.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Humayun Khan Isn’t the Only Muslim American Hero
No Answers in the Murder of Berta Cáceres
The Death of Berta Cáceres

Postscript: John Timoney, 1948-2016

In the nineteen-nineties, cop reporting was not a strength of the New York Times, and I’d often get calls from the Metro desk asking if I could help match something or other that had been in the tabs. I was Irish and Catholic and had grown up in Brooklyn along with other kids who wound up “on the job.” Oh, and I was an ex-sportswriter, too. I guess I had the pedigree of a cop reporter, if not any demonstrated talent.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The History of Crowd Control, and the Cleveland Convention
Improv for Cops
Los Porkys: The Sexual-Assault Case That’s Shaking Mexico