George Packer's Blog, page 181

A Stress-Test Election

All happy elections are alike, as Melania Trump might say, and each unhappy election is unhappy in its own way. But no American Presidential election, at least not one that anyone alive has experienced, has been as unhappy as this one. However ugly they got, the nation’s most miserable postwar contests, among them Lyndon B. Johnson vs. Barry Goldwater, in 1964, and Richard Nixon vs. Hubert Humphrey, in 1968, at least met a standard of coherence and rationality that now seems elusive. The Republican candidate, the television performer and businessman Donald J. Trump, is not only the strangest duck to have won a major-party nomination but is so uniquely unfit to hold office that the strongest unwritten plank in the platform of his Democratic opponent, the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is that she offers a sane alternative. She may be unloved in many quarters, but she is no Donald Trump.

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Related:
Hillary Wouldn’t Be the First Female American President
How the Sanders Campaign Got a Punk Sensibility
Memories of Trump’s Wedding

Hillary Wouldn’t Be the First Female American President

If she wins, Hillary Clinton won’t be the first female American to become President of a country. Janet Rosenberg beat her by a generation—and against much tougher odds.

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Related:
A Stress-Test Election
How the Sanders Campaign Got a Punk Sensibility
Memories of Trump’s Wedding

How the Sanders Campaign Got a Punk Sensibility

Last Thursday, a few hours before the end of the Democratic National Convention, two consultants to the Bernie Sanders campaign, Scott Goodstein and Arun Chaudhary, sat in the lobby of their Philadelphia hotel and considered what had become of the grassroots support for the candidate. Goodstein and Chaudhary’s firm ran the campaign’s digital operations, and so they had tracked the Sanders phenomenon from the beginning. Now, at the Wells Fargo Center, an angry core of Sanders holdouts was chanting through the speeches and staging periodic occupations of the media tent. Goodstein and Chaudhary believed that the outrage would subside. “So many people are being brought into the process for the first time,” Chaudhary said, and they weren’t used to the tidal emotions of political involvement, “where every moment is either utter catastrophe or complete triumph.” He continued, “After thinking their whole lives that no progress was possible, they had just been told that now maybe a hell of a lot of progress was possible. And now we’re like, well, some progress is possible. And there’s a gap.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Stress-Test Election
Hillary Wouldn’t Be the First Female American President
Memories of Trump’s Wedding

Memories of Trump’s Wedding

I have an abnormally poor autobiographical memory, but I am certain that in January, 2005, I attended the wedding of Melania Knauss and Donald Trump. I was there as the plus-one of my wife at the time, who had spent a few days in Melania’s company while reporting a cover story for Vogue about Melania’s wedding dress—a Christian Dior cone of white satin, from which the beautiful bride and her fuming sixteen-foot veil materialized as if from a volcano. I had met neither Melania Knauss nor Donald Trump, but, according to the Tiffany-produced invitation, they requested the honor of my presence at their marriage, at the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea, in Palm Beach, and thereafter at a reception at the Mar-a-Lago Club.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Stress-Test Election
Hillary Wouldn’t Be the First Female American President
How the Sanders Campaign Got a Punk Sensibility

What Donald Trump Doesn’t Get About Ghazala and Khizr Khan

“I am much weaker than she is, in such matters,” Khizr Khan said of his wife, Ghazala, in an interview on MSNBC with Lawrence O’Donnell on Friday, the day after he had addressed the Democratic National Convention. Ghazala was sitting beside him then, and she had been standing beside him the night before, as he told the story of their son, Captain Humayun Khan, an American soldier who died in Iraq. Watching them, it would seem difficult to doubt the strength of either the husband or the wife, or their shared pain and mutual commitment to being there, which was conveyed in each small gesture—difficult, that is, unless one’s name is Donald J. Trump.

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Related:
A Stress-Test Election
Memories of Trump’s Wedding
Trump and Russia: Even Historians See No Precedent

How Fast Would Usain Bolt Run the Mile?

Three minutes, forty-three seconds, and thirteen hundredths of a second is the fastest that a human has ever run a mile, as far as we know. Hicham El Guerrouj, a Moroccan middle-distance runner who was then twenty-four years old, accomplished the feat in 1999, averaging slightly more than sixteen miles per hour as he sped around Rome’s Olympic Stadium track. A determined wisp of a man, El Guerrouj weighed a hundred and twenty-eight pounds at the time and stood five feet nine inches tall in his running socks. Those few who’ve come close to running a mile as fast as El Guerrouj have been roughly the same size, and that’s not a coincidence: if you wish to run middle or long distances quickly, it helps to travel light.

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Related:
Is Your Refrigerator Running?
From Drug Dealer to Long-Distance Record-Setter: Kevin Castille’s Redemption
What We Think About When We Run

The Trouble with Owning a Grain Elevator

One steel-gray afternoon in the late winter, I pulled into a snow-coated gravel parking lot along the frozen Buffalo River. Geese sat around, honking, on the ice. Looming above them was the reason for my visit: a complex of three disused grain elevators, each containing dozens of silos that towered as many as thirteen stories high. I took them in for a while, until a forest-green 1973 Oldsmobile convertible rumbled up beside me. It belonged to Rick Smith, a local industrialist who had purchased the elevators, in 2006, almost by accident.

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Related:
Trump’s Mixed Messages to Wall Street
The Fallacy of Job Insecurity
Campaign Trade Wars

Where Was Climate Change at the Party Conventions?

Welcome to the Week in Business, a look at some of the biggest stories in business and economics.

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Related:
Photos from the Democratic National Convention: The Final Night
Live-Drawing Hillary’s Historic Convention
How Progressive Was Hillary Clinton’s Acceptance Speech?

Photos from the Democratic National Convention: The Final Night

On Thursday night, in Philadelphia, Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination. Philip Montgomery, who covered the Democratic National Convention for The New Yorker, was there.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Live-Drawing Hillary’s Historic Convention
Daily Cartoon: Friday, July 29th
How Progressive Was Hillary Clinton’s Acceptance Speech?

Doping and an Olympic Crisis of Idealism

When Thomas Hicks, an American runner, faltered near the end of the 1904 Olympic marathon, in St. Louis, his assistants gave him shots of strychnine (which is now commonly used as rat poison) and brandy to revive him. Hicks crossed the finish line after another American, Fred Lorz—but was declared the winner when it was discovered that Lorz had ridden eleven miles of the marathon in his coach’s car. The perception was that Lorz had cheated, and Hicks had not.

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Related:
What Made Suzy Run
Sailing Through the Trash and Sewage of Guanabara Bay
Ultimate Frisbee’s Surprising Arrival as a Likely Olympic Sport