George Packer's Blog, page 177

An Economic Moment, Frozen in Time

Three years ago I moved to the panhandle of western Maryland. It’s a wild, mountainous region. There are some lovely Victorian town centers, and also hardscrabble hamlets tucked into the valleys that are comprised largely of low-slung ranch houses fronted by chain-link fences and rusted pickup trucks. The past has a way of lingering in such places; there is no economic development to sweep it away, so it just sits there.

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Why Chinese Factories Fare Poorly in the U.S.

You Throw, Girl: An Olympic Shot-Putter’s Feminist Mission

The father of the modern Olympic movement, Pierre de Coubertin, argued, in 1912, that “the Olympic Games must be reserved for men.” The Games, he wrote, were for the “solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism,” and they had “female applause as reward.” By then, women were already competing at the Olympics, though they were shut out of many events, something that persisted for decades. There was no women’s marathon at the Olympics until the nineteen-eighties, for instance—and there is still a shorter roster of endurance events for women—because some men believed that female bodies could not withstand the mileage.

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The Murky History of the Butterfly Stroke
The Bodily Terror of Women’s Gymnastics
The Unbelievable, Amazing, Astonishing American Dominance at the Olympics

Michael Phelps and His Swim Cap

Earlier this year, Michael Phelps said that his decision to compete in one more Olympic Games had nothing to do with breaking more records or increasing his unprecedented gold-medal count. The asceticism and singular focus of the years leading up to Beijing, where he won gold eight times, had turned him into a machine, and Phelps just wanted to be human again. He told the world that he was on a personal journey to show that foibles and vulnerability—in his case, a D.U.I. and a stint in rehab, in 2014—can coexist with strength. This Tuesday night, however, Phelps couldn’t help himself. In his signature event, the two-hundred-metre butterfly, he had an extraordinary race. He cruised across the surface with the lightness of a great blue heron and the power of a dolphin. In an especially thrilling finish, he out-touched the two other fastest men to claim his twentieth gold. I don’t usually scream while watching televised sporting events, but, for the race’s last twenty-five metres, I was on my feet hollering.

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The Unbelievable, Amazing, Astonishing American Dominance at the Olympics
Olympic Swimming’s Finger-Wagging Moment
Women’s Gymnastics Deserves Better TV Coverage

The Grinding Fight to Root Out ISIS in a Battered Libya

In late July, on a tree-lined avenue of villas in Sirte, the coastal home town of the late dictator Muammar Qaddafi, Islamic State snipers pinned down a group of Libyan militiamen. It was early evening, a drawn-out time when the fighting usually starts to pick up. The figures of young men crouching or darting across the street with rocket-propelled grenades cast long shadows in the soft light. Amid the snap and rattle of automatic gunfire, the stereo from a nearby Toyota played an Islamic chant known as a nashid that seemed at once elegiac and fortifying.

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The Great Productivity Puzzle

I was going to start this column with some new productivity figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but I realized that at least half of the readers would quit right there. Productivity is one of those subjects that fascinates economists and bores, or mystifies, almost everyone else.

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The Unbelievable, Amazing, Astonishing American Dominance at the Olympics

Near the end of the third rotation of the women’s gymnastics team finals last night, the commentators on NBC’s live-stream broadcast returned to a subject from which they had rarely, and barely, strayed: the dominance of the American team. The Americans were good. So good. Historically good! But were they too good? Going into the final round, the United States was nearly five points ahead of China—meaning that every one of the American women could falter and the U.S. would probably still take the gold. And the team’s final apparatus was the floor, its best event. The commentators, whose voices normally bounce with enthusiasm, sounded suddenly weary. Would people care about a competition that wasn’t competitive? Would they grow bored of greatness? Or, as one of them plaintively asked, “How many times can you say ‘Wow!’ and ‘That was amazing!’?”

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Related:
Michael Phelps and His Swim Cap
Olympic Swimming’s Finger-Wagging Moment
Women’s Gymnastics Deserves Better TV Coverage

Donald Trump’s Tax-Return Dodge

Unlike every major-party Presidential candidate since 1976, Donald Trump will not release his tax returns. He’s being audited by the Internal Revenue Service, he has said, and so he will not release any return, for any year, until the audit is complete. Beyond that, his campaign has made it clear that, regardless of the status of the audit, Trump will not be releasing the returns before November.

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Why Gun Owners Should Reject Trump’s Call to “Second Amendment People”

On Tuesday, in Wilmington, North Carolina, Donald Trump was riffing on the “horrible” prospect of a Hillary Clinton victory when he paused and suggested, with a lift of his eyebrows, that there is a way that his opponent could be stopped. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Trump said. “Although, the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.”

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Donald Trump’s Tax-Return Dodge
Trump, Troilus, and Cressida
Thirty Things Donald Trump’s Advisers Managed to Persuade Him Not to Do Last Month

Olympic Swimming’s Finger-Wagging Moment

In the past three days, American swimmers have dominated the Olympic Games in Rio, winning fourteen of the twenty medals that Team U.S.A. has accrued so far. On Sunday night, the team’s two stars, Katie Ledecky and Michael Phelps, led the way. Ledecky, who is nineteen, shattered her own four-hundred-metre freestyle world record by nearly two seconds. It was the twelfth world record she has set since 2012, and almost five seconds faster than Jazz Carlin, the British swimmer who finished second. Such a large margin of victory in that event hasn’t happened in sixty years. Phelps, who at thirty-one is an old-man Olympian, swam one of his personal bests for his leg of the men’s four-hundred-metre relay, helping his team win back the gold medal, which they’d lost to the French in London, in 2012. Both victories were exhilarating, joyful displays of chlorinated American achievement. After Ledecky touched the wall and saw her time, she pumped her fist and broke into a wide grin. The third place finisher, Ledecky’s teammate Leah Smith, said, “It’s really exciting to see the crowd going insane.” (Distance swimming doesn’t usually fill arenas with roaring fans.) “You imagine it’s for you, but you know it is for Katie.” One of Phelps’s relay teammates, a rookie named Ryan Held, who swam the third leg, sobbed on the podium. Phelps gave him a hug and a gentle noogie.

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Brazil’s Olympics Meet Its Favelas
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Women’s Gymnastics Deserves Better TV Coverage

This month, NBC will once again attempt to pull one of the greatest tricks in television: convincing people to care about sports they that have ignored for the past four years. Millions of Americans will turn on their televisions in the coming days to watch Ping-Pong and beach volleyball and women’s gymnastics, which consistently ranks among the highest-rated Olympic sports despite the fact that only a very small number of Americans can tell the difference between a Produnova and an Amanar. In gymnastics and other sports, NBC often compensates for the viewer’s lack of knowledge by inserting drama—in 2012, the network notoriously made it seem as if the American women’s hopes for gold were in greater peril than they actually were by simply not airing the fact that a Russian gymnast had fallen during her floor exercise—and by spending time on every topic except for explaining the sports themselves.

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The Paradox of Brazil and Its Olympiad
Doping and an Olympic Crisis of Idealism
The Mind-Blowing Athleticism of Simone Biles