George Packer's Blog, page 174

Clearing the Bar: The Philosophy of the High Jump

Of all the track-and-field disciplines, the high jump had always been the one that held the least appeal for me. There was none of the awesome danger of the pole vault. It didn’t look like a freakish feat of strength or speed. It looked weird. Even the jumpers looked strange—tall and skeletal, all sinew and bone. They could clear a bar nearly eight feet high, the height of a standard ceiling. But on television it didn’t look like they were jumping over a truck. It looked liked they were goofing off. Who, after all, would jump over a truck like that?

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Related:
The Beauty of Shaunae Miller’s Ugly Dive in Rio
Watching the Olympics: Gymnastics for Bodybuilders
The Magic of Olympic Track Cycling

The Cracked Integrity of Donald Trump

You have to say this for the crooked demagogues and reactionary populists of the American past: they may have stirred the bitter soup of nativist resentment with as much zeal as Donald J. Trump, but their family counselors did not take time out from politics to cruise the Aegean on a plutocrat’s yacht; their rhetorical counselors did not attempt, for decades, to instill fear in their employees through the most squalid sort of sexual terror; and their political counselors never worked in the interest of Slavic autocrats. Oh, Father Coughlin, we hardly knew ye!

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Song of the Summer: “Bawitdaba,” by Kid Rock
An Infrastructure Proposal That Goes Beyond Clinton and Trump
Donald Trump in Denmark

Donald Trump in Denmark

I’ve spent the past few days in Denmark, the country into which I’ve married and where, over the years, I’ve often been asked to explain what’s happening back home. Reality sometimes gets distorted by distance, as when, eight years ago, several Danes informed me that the United States would never elect a black man as President. This year, the visit was a chance to express the belief that, though Americans may practice political brinksmanship, we are not about to let loose a bomb—or probably not.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s Blunt-Force Foreign Policy
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, August 16th
Donald Trump Is the Gift to Hillary Clinton That Keeps On Giving

The Beauty of Shaunae Miller’s Ugly Dive in Rio

If the final moments of Monday night’s women’s four hundred metres in Rio had been in a sports movie, they would have been shot in momentous slow motion. In one lane was Shaunae Miller, of the Bahamas, two steps from the finish, clinging to a lead. A few lanes over and a step behind was the favorite, Allyson Felix, of the United States, charging hard. At the crucial moment, Miller lunged awkwardly, and fell headfirst toward the line, while Felix leaned classically forward, her head slightly up, an image of athletic grace. Who had won? The question stretched for several cinematic seconds, before Miller’s name flashed on the board, the winner by seven hundredths of a second. “We have barely ever seen a more dramatic end to a race than that,” NBC’s analyst declared, and in movie land, at this point, the musical score would have swelled to match the roar of the crowd as the camera captured Miller’s exhausted face in closeup, the victorious underdog.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Watching the Olympics: Gymnastics for Bodybuilders
The Magic of Olympic Track Cycling
Meb Keflezighi, Bernard Lagat, and the Secret to Running Forever

Watching the Olympics: Gymnastics for Bodybuilders

Ah, gymnastics, the beloved Olympic sport of short, compact humans. Acrobatic moves are best executed by athletes with lean musculature and small bodies.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Beauty of Shaunae Miller’s Ugly Dive in Rio
The Magic of Olympic Track Cycling
The Brilliance of Usain Bolt, Mo Farah, and Wayde Van Niekerk

Trump’s Blunt-Force Foreign Policy

A quarter century before he ran for the Presidency, Donald Trump lobbied to be the chief U.S. negotiator with the Soviet Union on a deal to mutually limit their nuclear arsenals. It was in the late eighties, shortly after his book “The Art of the Deal” was on the Times best-seller list for fifty-one weeks. The George H. W. Bush Administration instead tapped Richard Burt, who had spent much of his career in national security. Burt was the Ambassador to West Germany in the run-up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. According to a story circulating in Washington, Trump and Burt later met at a society wedding in New York. Trump approached Burt and offered advice on how he would deal with the Soviets. He said that he would initially be the gracious host and ask the Soviet delegation to get comfortable around the table. Then, Trump told Burt, he would stand up, shout “Fuck you!,” and immediately walk out of the room. Burt’s team subsequently concluded the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, one of the largest and most complex arms deals in history. (When I asked Burt about the wedding conversation, he would neither confirm nor deny it. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump in Denmark
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, August 16th
Donald Trump Is the Gift to Hillary Clinton That Keeps On Giving

Donald Trump Is the Gift to Hillary Clinton That Keeps On Giving

Another day, another blown opportunity for Donald Trump. Speaking in Youngstown, Ohio, on Monday afternoon, the embattled Republican nominee sought to reboot his Presidential campaign for the umpteenth time, in this case by calling for a Cold War-style effort to confront radical Islam. Expanding upon his call to ban entry to the United States to people from countries affected by terrorism, he attacked Hillary Clinton, saying she lacked the “mental and physical stamina” to defeat ISIS.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump in Denmark
Trump’s Blunt-Force Foreign Policy
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, August 16th

Meb Keflezighi, Bernard Lagat, and the Secret to Running Forever

In 2001, a professional runner named Gregory Jimmerson headed up to Mammoth Lakes, California, to spend a couple of weeks running with his old friend and rival Meb Keflezighi. The two were born three months apart, and they’d been roughly as good when younger. Both had come in second at the national high-school cross-country championships as seniors—Jimmerson in 1992 and Meb in 1993. As a senior at Stanford, in 1996, Jimmerson had been the fastest American in the N.C.A.A. cross-country championships. Meb, who attended U.C.L.A, finished a few places behind. The next year, Meb, who is universally known in the running world by his first name, won the race.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Deceptive Calm of Olympic Open-Water Swimming
Can Ashton Eaton Save the Decathlon?
Michael Phelps’s Most Memorable Race

The Deceptive Calm of Olympic Open-Water Swimming

Twenty-six women raced a ten-kilometre course this morning in the choppy aquamarine waters off Copacabana Beach, completing the last of the Olympic women’s swimming events, and the only one not held in a pool. (The men will follow tomorrow.) It was a fitting conclusion to the past week’s exhilarating and historic indoor aquatic performances. Although marathon swimming, as the contest is known, only became an Olympic event in 2008, at the Beijing Games, it nods to the sport’s ancient origins more than anything that happens now in a pool. It is also, arguably, much harder. Pool swimming is a spectacle of perfection, with each competitor alone in a lane, exhibiting peak mastery of one of the sport’s four strokes—backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, or freestyle. Open-water swimming is cruder, less elegant, more primal. The women racing today, for roughly two hours, had to contend physically and psychologically not only with the elements—a strong opposing current, wind chop on the surface, a blazing sun, water high in bacteria—but also with one another, ceaselessly, right up to the last hundredth of a second.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Meb Keflezighi, Bernard Lagat, and the Secret to Running Forever
Can Ashton Eaton Save the Decathlon?
The Agony and Ecstasy of India at the Olympics

The Very Strange Writings of Putin’s New Chief of Staff

For a country where politics has long been monopolized by the state, Russia has seen a lot of news in the past few weeks. It has been the sort of news that autocracies produce: resignations and appointments, the reshuffling of opaque men and often obscure names. High-level officials have been removed, some have been accused of embezzling and jailed, and last week Vladimir Putin changed his chief of staff, replacing an old K.G.B. colleague, Sergei Ivanov, with Anton Vayno, a younger, little-known bureaucrat who has been serving as deputy chief of staff.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump and Putin: A Love Story
Trump and Russia: Even Historians See No Precedent
How the Republican Establishment Lost to Trump on Russia