George Packer's Blog, page 176

The Ordinary Outrage of the Baltimore Police Report

At its most obvious, the Department of Justice report on the Baltimore Police Department added a hundred sixty-three pages to the great tower of foregone conclusions. In short, the Baltimore Police Department engaged in a pattern of stopping African-Americans without any real justification. Between 2010 and 2015, there were three hundred thousand police stops, of which less than four per cent resulted in a citation or arrest. Forty-four per cent of those stops occurred in two small, mostly black neighborhoods, and ninety-five per cent of people who were stopped ten times or more were African-American.

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Related:
The Long, Vital History of Bystander Recordings
The Power of Looking, from Emmett Till to Philando Castile
In Cleveland, the American Dream Melts Away

Caster Semenya and the Logic of Olympic Competition

During the Rio Olympics, Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Thompson will be discussing the track-and-field events, as they did during the 2012 London Games and during the 2015 World Championships.

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Related:
Simone Biles Becomes the Greatest Gymnast of All Time
The Murky History of the Butterfly Stroke
The Bodily Terror of Women’s Gymnastics

The Real Scandal of Hillary Clinton’s E-Mails

On Wednesday, the conservative group Judicial Watch released two hundred and ninety-six pages of e-mails that Hillary Clinton and her aides at the State Department had exchanged. Judicial Watch’s president has said that they came from the e-mail account of Huma Abedin, who was then Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. In these e-mails, Abedin is forever chasing down her colleagues, across different floors of hotels. “Where r u?” she writes to the policy aide Jake Sullivan. “Where r u?” she asks the State Department official Paul Narain. “Meet you at Hyatt,” she tells the President’s body man, Reggie Love. You sense a swarm of prominent people circling Abedin, hoping to win a quarter-hour of her time or a minute of her boss’s: the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, the banker Stephen Roach, the cyclist Lance Armstrong. Abedin’s own attention is on the other young staffers who have daily contact with Clinton—on the need to clarify, confer, meet up. Sullivan is in the lobby or “gallivanting”; Narain is at the ballroom; Philippe Reines is in his hotel room; Sarah Farnsworth is at the lobby bar. These tiny social centers of power regulate the far-larger one, Clinton herself. To those outside it, even just outside it, the circle around the Secretary of State can seem impenetrable. “I hope that one of you can get this to the Secretary—I’ve sent it to everyone else,” Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote to Abedin and Sullivan, in April, 2009, appealing to them to forward a document. At the time, Slaughter was Clinton’s director of policy planning.

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Related:
How Hillary Clinton Became a Better Economic Populist Than Donald Trump
Why Gun Owners Should Reject Trump’s Call to “Second Amendment People”
Wall Street’s Reluctant Embrace of Clinton

Simone Biles Becomes the Greatest Gymnast of All Time

Simone Biles was already the three-time defending gymnastics world champion when I met her for the first time, in January, at a photo shoot for her signature leotard line, yet everyone in her entourage was wary of talking about her qualification for the Olympics, let alone her anticipated coronation at the Games. “We have to get there first,” Aimee Boorman, her coach, said. “Everybody, collectively, let’s just knock on some wood here.” Boorman joked that she wanted to find a wooden bracelet to wear so that she could touch it anytime she talked about the Olympics. But keeping up the pretense, in the face of Biles’s overwhelming talent, eventually became too difficult. “I don’t say ‘if’ she wins anymore,” Nellie Biles, Simone’s mother, told me when we spoke in April, at the Pacific Rim Championships, in Everett, Washington. “I say ‘when.’ ”

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Related:
Caster Semenya and the Logic of Olympic Competition
Daily Cartoon: Friday, August 12th
The Murky History of the Butterfly Stroke

How Hillary Clinton Became a Better Economic Populist Than Donald Trump

When Hillary Clinton took the stage in Warren, Michigan, on Thursday to deliver a highly publicized address outlining her plans to revitalize the American economy, the benchmark for success was set low. Donald Trump had established the standard a few days earlier, on Monday, during his own, much-hyped economic speech. Appearing at the Detroit Economic Club, he offered more details on his contradictory, and clearly evolving, vision for the country by first describing Detroit as a decrepit place where dreams go to die because foreigners have stolen all the jobs, and where the lines on every chart are headed in one direction: down. He then, confusingly, described a plan that seemed to vastly favor the wealthy with generous tax cuts. He made it all too easy for Clinton to step in and take the populist, “I’m with you” message that Trump used to great success earlier in his campaign and appropriate it for herself.

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Related:
The Real Scandal of Hillary Clinton’s E-Mails
Daily Cartoon: Friday, August 12th
Trump Says He Would Only Use Nuclear Weapons in a Sarcastic Way

Why Facebook Is Really Blocking the Ad Blockers

Ads can seem like the bane of the Internet. They take up real estate and slow Web pages while they load; at worst, they splash across the screen for interminable seconds, shout loudly and unexpectedly from an invisible corner, or surreptitiously infest the host computer with malware. Around two hundred million users worldwide have tools to block these ads and prevent them from loading, according to reports from the ad-blocking-circumvention startup PageFair.

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Snapchat, Instagram Stories, and the Internet of Forgetting
Inspirational Office Posters Inspired by Mark Zuckerberg
The Open Letter Denouncing Trump You’re Going to Read on Facebook for the Next Four Months

The Hole in Obama’s Legacy

In the spring of 2005, I received an invitation to a small dinner in Washington, D.C., with the new junior senator from Illinois. The other invitees all turned out to be leaders of national progressive organizations. We introduced ourselves, and John Podesta—then the president of the Center for American Progress, now Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief—thanked Barack Obama, on the group’s behalf, for an invitation to a meal that was not accompanied by a demand for at least a thousand-dollar donation. We all chuckled, in those innocent, pre-Citizens United days, about our corrupt electoral system.

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Related:
How Hillary Clinton Became a Better Economic Populist Than Donald Trump
Daily Cartoon: Friday, August 12th
Trump Says He Would Only Use Nuclear Weapons in a Sarcastic Way

Why Trump’s Crazy Talk About Obama and ISIS Matters

On Thursday morning, Donald Trump doubled down on his latest verbal outrage: the claim that President Obama was the “founder” of ISIS. Actually, the Republican Presidential nominee tripled down. Appearing on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” he described himself as “a truth teller” and went on to say that the President was “the founder of ISIS absolutely, the way he removed our troops.” Referring to Hillary Clinton, Trump added, “I call them co-founders.”

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Related:
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, August 11th
Trump Blasts Media for Reporting Things He Says
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, August 10th

The Murky History of the Butterfly Stroke

When an amateur swimmer tries to learn the butterfly, a couple of questions might come to mind in between gasps for air: Who invented this flummoxing stroke, and why? Professionals such as Michael Phelps make the butterfly looks effortless, an act of coördination, grace, and endurance; for beginners, it can look and feel like a wild, flailing doggy paddle. But these questions are as difficult to answer as the stroke is to master. As with other paradigm-shifting inventions, like jazz music and the croissant, the butterfly stroke is the result of a series of small innovations rather than of any single big one. Because of that, tracing the stroke’s origin is difficult, an exercise in weighing disparate accounts.

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Related:
The Bodily Terror of Women’s Gymnastics
You Throw, Girl: An Olympic Shot-Putter’s Feminist Mission
The Unbelievable, Amazing, Astonishing American Dominance at the Olympics

The Link Between Money and Aggressive Policing

On September 4, 2014, Levar Jones pulled into a gas station near Columbia, South Carolina, where he lives. It was late afternoon, around 5 P.M., and he had just stepped out of his car when a state trooper named Sean Groubert pulled up behind him and asked to see his license. Jones turned to retrieve his identification from the car, and, at that moment, Groubert pulled out his gun and rushed over to Jones. Dash-cam footage released later by officials shows Groubert shouting, “Get out of the car! Get out of the car!” As Jones turned around, Groubert fired four rounds, striking Jones once in the hip. Jones, who was unarmed, stumbled to the ground.

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Related:
American Tennis in Black and White
Watching “The Purge” in Our Year of Nightmare Politics
A Tale of Racial Passing and the U.S.-Mexico Border