George Packer's Blog, page 179

Watching the Olympics: The Bodies

There is always a lot of hubbub about the PERFECT BODY for swimming. During the last Olympics, Michael Phelps was known as The Man Who Was Built To Be a Swimmer.

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Related:
The Olympics Opening Ceremony in Rio: Let the Games Begin
An American Rider Trying to Beat the Boys in Rio
Olympic Events I Would Definitely Win (If They Existed)

Why We Pine for Manufacturing

While this year’s Democratic and Republican platforms don’t agree on much, aside from that the other party’s candidate will drive America into ruin, there is at least one area of unanimity: a phrase like “one of the best ways to innovate, prosper, and create good-paying jobs is to make more in America” could be an expression of Trumpian jingoism, Sandersonian egalitarianism, or mainstream thought of either party. (That particular line is from the Democrats’ platform.) There is a bipartisan consensus that the shrinking of American manufacturing is a central story (or even the central story) of America today. No President has ever used the word “manufacturing” in his State of the Union messages as often as President Obama has. Donald Trump put the word “make” on the front of his cap, and at the center of his campaign.

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Related:
The Trouble with Corey Lewandowski on CNN
Why Donald Trump Can’t Stop Talking About the Pallets of Cash
What Will Decide the Presidential Election?

An American Rider Trying to Beat the Boys in Rio

There are two Olympic-level athletic endeavors in which men and women square off head to head: sailing and equestrian sports. Eventing, an equestrian sport in which horse and rider compete in three phases—dressage, cross-country, and stadium jumping—has been called the most dangerous competition in the Olympics. That danger has never deterred female riders: they have competed alongside men since the field became open to them, at the 1964 Games, in Tokyo. Women do well in the sport, but they have struggled to reach its uppermost echelon: the current top-ten list of the Fédération Équestre Internationale, the sport’s governing body, is made up of eight men and two woman. There are, however, six women in the following ten spots—and sitting at No. 12, eager to crash the old guard, is the top female eventing athlete in the United States, twenty-nine-year-old Lauren Kieffer.

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Related:
The Olympics Opening Ceremony in Rio: Let the Games Begin
What the Olympics Mean for Rio
New Events for the 2016 Rio Olympics

The Trouble with Corey Lewandowski on CNN

This week, Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN, offered an upbeat assessment of one of the network’s newest additions, Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, whom Zucker hired as an on-air political commentator in June. “I actually think he’s done a really nice job,” Zucker said in an interview with Variety. “He’s come under a much greater spotlight because of who he is, and the relationship he’s had with the media. As a result, people are going to be more critical.” It’s hard to know quite what to make of this. Bosses like to stand by their hiring decisions when they can—fair enough. But Lewandowski has manifestly not been doing a “really nice job” in his new role, unless his role is not so much to comment on the Trump campaign as to embody the pathologies of it.

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Related:
Why We Pine for Manufacturing
Why Donald Trump Can’t Stop Talking About the Pallets of Cash
What Will Decide the Presidential Election?

College Students Go to Court Over Sexual Assault

More than twenty-five years ago, alleged rapists’ names were scrawled in bathroom stalls at Brown University. These signs of outrage accompanied campus activists’ demands to improve sexual-offense policies and training for male students. Change was slow, but five years ago the Obama Administration began to take an active role in combatting campus sexual violence. The Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights announced that Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination in education means that schools that receive federal funding (practically all colleges, universities, and school districts) must have effective policies and procedures for resolving sexual-violence complaints. In 2014, O.C.R. posted a list of higher-education institutions that were under federal investigation for possible violations of Title IX in their handling of sexual violence and sexual harassment. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, that list (which included Harvard Law School, where I teach) has grown in the past two years, from fifty-five schools to almost two hundred and thirty, public and private, large and small, from all regions of the country.

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Related:
The Transgender Bathroom Debate and the Looming Title IX Crisis
Going to Court in Jon Krakauer’s “Missoula”

The Paradox of Brazil and Its Olympiad

For many countries, the prospect of hosting the Summer Olympics is sought after as the maximum consecration of their place as a modern power. In the past century, this was notoriously evident at the Berlin Olympics, of 1936, which Adolf Hitler hoped to use to show off the Olympian superiority of his master race. Eight years ago, the Beijing Olympics, with their showy inaugural ceremony and no-expenses-spared sports venues, were China’s statement about its place on the world scene. When Brazil was selected as the host of this Olympiad, seven years ago, it seemed fitting that the great South American nation—much admired for many things, including its people’s renowned charisma—should have the honor of hosting the 2016 Games.

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Related:
New Events for the 2016 Rio Olympics
Doping and an Olympic Crisis of Idealism
The Non-Political Political Arrest of Nikita Belykh in Russia

The Power of Looking, from Emmett Till to Philando Castile

On September 2, 1955, a metal casket containing Emmett Till’s bloated and broken body arrived in Chicago. Less than two weeks before, Till, a fourteen-year-old African-American boy, had travelled down to Mississippi to visit relatives, a summer sojourn made by many children of the Great Migration. On August 24th, Till, along with some of his cousins and friends, had stopped in at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, where Till allegedly spoke to Carolyn Bryant, a twenty-one-year-old white woman, who was working behind the store’s counter.

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In Cleveland, the American Dream Melts Away
Baton Rouge and a Reservoir of Wrongs
Racism, Stress, and Black Death

A Century Later, the U.S. Defends Its Olympic Rugby Title

The International Olympic Committee’s announcement, in October, 2009, that rugby union would make its return to the Summer Olympics in 2016 resurrected a long-forgotten American triumph. Nearly a century has passed since the Olympics featured rugby, and at no point has a conversation about the sport’s contemporary powerhouses included the United States. But when the torch is lit in Rio de Janeiro, the U.S. men’s team, called the Eagles, will take the field at Deodoro Stadium to defend a ninety-two-year-old championship.

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Related:
Olympic Events I Would Definitely Win (If They Existed)
New Events for the 2016 Rio Olympics
American Tennis in Black and White

What the Olympics Mean for Rio

This past weekend, Brazil’s acting President, Michel Temer, attended a ceremony to inaugurate the subway line that will take people to and from Barra, the Rio de Janeiro suburb where most of the venues for this year’s summer Olympics were built. The event was meant to showcase how the people of Rio will benefit from hosting the Olympics, but it couldn’t avoid calling to mind a litany of issues. Like many of Rio’s other Olympics-related infrastructure projects, the subway line was barely finished in time for the games. One of the construction firms that worked on the line had recently confessed to paying kickbacks on the contract. And, most troubling for the city’s largely working-class population, the ten-mile line served primarily to link two wealthy beachside areas—Barra and Ipanema—while a planned extension into the poorer north side of town remains on the drawing board.

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Related:
New Events for the 2016 Rio Olympics
The Next Great American Soccer Star?
Zikanomics: Is Congress on the Mosquitoes’ Side?

Why Donald Trump Can’t Stop Talking About the Pallets of Cash

The speech that Donald Trump gave on Wednesday in Daytona Beach, Florida, was not his most menacing or self-destructive, but, like many of his recent public addresses, it was confusing. Trump gave a distracted account of the Saudi intervention in Yemen that did not come to a point: “So they’re fighting, for Yemen, back and forth.” He said he saw a documentary showing that the U.S. Air Force was using such old equipment that it was raiding museums for spare parts. When speaking about a payment that the government made to Iran in January, he claimed to have seen a video of piles of cash being unloaded from a plane in Tehran. The video was shot from the “perfect angle, nice and steady,” Trump said, warming to his story. Later, his campaign explained that Trump was speaking about footage of Americans who had been held hostage by Iran leaving a plane in Geneva, which had accompanied a Fox News report about the payment coinciding with their release. That was the part of the speech that made the news. But there were plenty of other pieces of conjecture, stories that broke off, and lines of thought that seemed to amble off into the distance. Even the most obvious political arguments tended not to reach a point. “If Hillary puts her people on the Supreme Court,” Trump told his supporters, “like, who knows?”

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Related:
What Will Decide the Presidential Election?
D.N.C. Headquarters Mobbed by Republican Refugees Seeking Asylum
Ivanka Trump and the Question of Sexual Harassment