George Packer's Blog, page 180

What Will Decide the Presidential Election?

“Events, my dear boy, events.” David Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor, quoted this comment (attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, on the question of what would decide his country’s political direction) in a discussion he moderated Tuesday evening at NeueHouse Madison Square. Remnick asked the panelists—I was one of them, along with my colleagues Jelani Cobb and Emily Nussbaum—what turns of fortune might throw the election “one way or another” in the next hundred days. How might events, in other words, whether tidal or unexpectedly catastrophic, put the country in the hands of either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?

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Related:
D.N.C. Headquarters Mobbed by Republican Refugees Seeking Asylum
Ivanka Trump and the Question of Sexual Harassment
Trump and Putin: A Love Story

Summer Basketball in the Motherland

On a recent sunny afternoon, the former N.B.A. All-Star Baron Davis walked into the gymnasium of King Drew Magnet High School of Medicine and Science, on the east side of South Los Angeles, where the nation’s preëminent pro-am basketball league, the Drew, plays each summer. Davis, wearing a close-trimmed beard and cornrows, had a bounce in his stride. Players from an earlier game cleared the floor, as Dom Kennedy’s “A Intermission for Watts” boomed over the loudspeakers: “Love to the Eastside, but Watts is the motherland.” Nodding his head, Davis grabbed a ball and started firing jumpers from the corner, the letters written across his bulky shoulders—“Los Angeles”—wrinkling, like the ink on a seismograph, with each shot.

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Dunk with Power

Ivanka Trump and the Question of Sexual Harassment

“Sexual harassment,” Greta Van Susteren said to Ivanka Trump, in an interview Tuesday evening. Trump paused, flicked her fingers, and drew back her eyebrows slightly, as if she expected a bit more of a prompt. What exactly did this have to do with her? “He was just asked about it,” Van Susteren said, referring to Donald Trump, Ivanka’s father. The day before, a USA Today columnist had asked the elder Trump to imagine a boss behaving toward Ivanka in the way that Roger Ailes, until recently the head of Fox News, allegedly behaved toward his female employees. “I would like to think she would find another career or find another company if that was the case,” Trump said—his harassed daughter should leave behind what she had worked for, that is, while the harasser remained, an outcome that would strike many as the premise of a sexual-harassment complaint, rather than, as Trump seemed to believe, its resolution. Van Susteren began again—“So, sexual harassment . . .”—but she needn’t have worried: Ivanka had caught on, and was already speaking over her. “I think it’s inexcusable,” she said rapidly. “I think it, sexual harassment, is inexcusable in any setting. I think harassment in general, regardless, sexual or otherwise, is totally inexcusable.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump and Putin: A Love Story
Trump Bolsters Foreign-Policy Team by Adding Carson and Palin
A Stress-Test Election

Why It’s So Hard to Regulate Payday Lenders

Georgia’s founder, James Oglethorpe, an eighteenth-century social reformer, envisioned the colony as an economic utopia—a haven for those locked in Britain’s debtors’ prisons. Oglethorpe petitioned King George II to allow the country’s worthy poor a second chance in an overseas settlement, and then instituted laws that sought to erase class distinctions while prohibiting alcohol and slavery. The experiment lasted less than two decades, cut short by Spanish hostilities and resistance from residents who wanted to own slaves and drink rum.

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Valeant: Why Moneyball Failed in the Pharmaceutical Industry
A Debt Deal to Keep Greece in the Eurozone?
Will Angela Merkel Save the European Ideal?

American Tennis in Black and White

The news about Olympic tennis, which begins on Saturday, has, so far, mostly concerned those who won’t be playing. Maria Sharapova is out, barred from all tournament play for using the newly banned performance-enhancing drug meldonium. Roger Federer announced last week that he will not be playing tennis anywhere for the remainder of 2016, in order to rest a knee that was operated on earlier this year and that he may have reinjured at Wimbledon. Stan Wawrinka, the No. 4 men’s player in the world, is also out with an injury. A number of top players—among them, third-ranked Simona Halep, of Romania, and eighth-ranked Tomáš Berdych, of the Czech Republic—are skipping the Rio Games, expressing concerns about the Zika virus. The Canadian Milos Raonic, who has been playing terrific tennis—he reached the Wimbledon final and is No. 3 in the so-called Race to London rankings, which count only points earned this year—has also cited Zika as a reason he will not be in Rio. Raonic was candid enough to acknowledge that his focus is on playing A.T.P. tournaments, like last week’s Rogers Cup, in Toronto (where he was upset in the quarter-finals by Gaël Monfils), which are important tune-ups for the U.S. Open, and where a player can earn prize money and points toward his international ranking. The Olympics, which reinstated tennis as a full-medal event only in 1988, after a sixty-four-year absence, have, of course, never offered prize money. And this year medal winners will not be awarded ranking points, either, as they have in previous Games. Staying away is not just about mosquitoes.

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A Tale of Racial Passing and the U.S.-Mexico Border
Serena Williams, Andy Murray, and a Political Wimbledon
The Unexpected Challenge: Roger Federer’s Wimbledon Quarterfinal Victory

Trump and Putin: A Love Story

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Donald J. Trump are locked in a humid political embrace, which seems, at first glance, unlikely. Putin grew up in postwar Leningrad. In the dismal courtyard of his building on Baskov Lane, a hangout for local thugs and drunks, he and his childhood friends pursued their favorite pastime: chasing rats with sticks. His father, a wounded veteran, beat him with a belt. Putin’s way up, his dream, was to volunteer for the K.G.B. Donald Trump encountered few rats on his lawn in Jamaica Estates. Soft, surly, and academically uninterested, Donald was disruptive in class—so much so that his father, a real-estate tycoon of the outer boroughs, shipped him off to military school when he was thirteen. He did not set out to serve his country; he set out to multiply his father’s fortune. “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” Trump has said. “The temperament is not that different.”

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Trump Bolsters Foreign-Policy Team by Adding Carson and Palin
A Stress-Test Election
Hillary Wouldn’t Be the First Female American President

A Voting-Rights Victory in North Carolina

Last Friday, three judges of the federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, struck down key parts of a North Carolina election law. Passed by a Republican legislature in 2013, the law imposed strict voter-identification requirements, reduced the state’s early-voting period, and made new-voter registration more difficult. In a forceful opinion, Judge Diana Motz, a Bill Clinton appointee, ruled that the law had been crafted in order to limit the number of black voters, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic. “Because of race,” Motz wrote, “the legislature enacted one of the largest restrictions of the franchise in modern North Carolina history.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Thousand Miles for the Right to Vote
Judging the Right to Vote

The Refugee Olympians in Rio

Samia Yusuf Omar, who was lithe to the point of frailty, sprinted her way to momentary fame at the Beijing Olympics, in 2008. She was one of two athletes on the team from war-torn Somalia. Only seventeen, she’d had no professional coaching, and had dropped out of school in the eighth grade, after her father died, to help care for five younger siblings while her mother peddled produce. She practiced at a bombed-out stadium in Mogadishu. Female athletes were rare in Somalia, and she faced harassment and intimidation from Islamist militias. In Beijing, she dared to run without a hijab. Virtually no one in Somalia was able to watch her compete—no TV station carried the Olympics, and many Somalis had no television or electricity, anyway. Omar’s running shoes had been donated by runners on Sudan’s team.

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Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, July 5th
Who Bombed the Istanbul Airport?
Former Ambassador Robert Ford on the State Department Mutiny on Syria

The Founder of Theranos Tries to Change the Subject

On Monday, Patricia Jones, the president of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry, made an unusual introduction at the sixty-eighth Annual Scientific Meeting and Clinical Lab Expo, in Philadelphia. “This session is not an endorsement of Theranos,” Jones said, somewhat nervously, adding, “Please be courteous.” The fact that it seemed necessary to issue a plea to avoid hostility in front of an audience of chemists and lab experts was testament to the emotions surrounding the presenter. Jones was introducing Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and chief executive officer of Theranos, a company that sought to revolutionize the collection and testing of blood but has, instead, become a subject of regulatory scrutiny. “This session, folks, as everyone is pretty well aware, has been controversial,” Jones continued. “It has generated a lot of interest from the lab-medicine community. We’re all aware that there have been some questions about whether we’ll see any science here today, and the viability of Theranos technology. This is a tremendous opportunity for A.A.C.C. members to decide that for themselves.”

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Related:
Zikanomics: Is Congress on the Mosquitoes’ Side?
The Secrets of a Billionaire’s Blood-Testing Startup

The Next Great American Soccer Star?

When this year began, almost no one, and certainly not Mallory Pugh herself, thought she would make the eighteen-woman roster for the U.S. Olympic team in Rio de Janeiro. At the start of 2016, Pugh hadn’t even trained with the senior squad, much less played in a game for the team that has won three straight gold medals, is the defending Women’s World Cup champion, and holds the world’s top ranking. Pugh, when 2016 began, was seventeen years old.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Doping and an Olympic Crisis of Idealism
Scenes from the Copa América Championship
Soccer-Parent Practice