George Packer's Blog, page 183

Obama’s Powerful Message: Donald Trump Is Un-American

It was about 8:40 P.M. last night when President Obama climbed aboard Air Force One for the hop to Philadelphia, where he was scheduled to speak at about 10:30 P.M. As an accomplished speaker, he must have known that the speech that would be fed into the teleprompters at the Wells Fargo Center was one of his best. As an astute politician, he must have known that, in other respects, too, the ground was being laid for a memorable night.

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Related:
Hillary’s Night
Trump and Russia: Even Historians See No Precedent
What the Kremlin Makes of Donald Trump

Joe Biden and the Democratic Family at the D.N.C.

“We’re family,” Joe Biden said, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, on Wednesday night, as he described the relationship that he and his wife, Jill, had built with the Obamas in the eight years since he accepted his Party’s Vice-Presidential nomination. In that time, he said, Barack Obama had become “one of the finest Presidents we have ever had” and also his friend. “He has become a brother to Jill and me. And Michelle? I don’t know where you are, kid, but you’re incredible.” He smiled and pointed with both hands to where he thought she might be sitting, in the boxes above a crowd that was cheering wildly—for Joe, for Michelle, for a moment in a fractious Convention which seemed to be everything it ought to be.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks
Jill Stein’s Play to the Bernie-or-Bust Contingent
A Diehard Bernie Backer Considers What Comes Next

A Real Wave of Terror in France

A. J. Liebling, the greatest of both Francophiles and media critics, wrote once that the reporter tells you what he’s seen, the writer the hidden meaning of what he’s seen, and the expert the hidden meaning of what he hasn’t seen. Male pronouns aside, the wisdom remains: not having experienced the ongoing plague of Islamist violence in France as it happened, even the most veteran French hand has a limited sense of what it means. Nonetheless, e-mail and the phone and the press tell something, if not everything, and the wisest things they tell are consistently and notably double. A favorite French idiom rises to mind: grown people ought to be able to count to two, meaning not so much that social issues usually have two sides as that a person must often accept one truth about the world while also accepting a second.

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Related:
Finding Solace in Henri Matisse’s Nice
The Tragic and Unsurprising News from Nice
What We Know About the Attacker in Nice

The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks

For six months, starting in the fall of 2014, I investigated a shadowy online Russian propaganda operation called the Internet Research Agency. The agency has been widely reported in Russian media to be the brainchild of Evgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch and ally of Vladimir Putin. At the time, it employed hundreds of Russians in a nondescript office building in St. Petersburg, where they produced blog posts, comments, infographics, and viral videos that pushed the Kremlin’s narrative on both the Russian and English Internet.

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Related:
Joe Biden and the Democratic Family at the D.N.C.
Jill Stein’s Play to the Bernie-or-Bust Contingent
A Diehard Bernie Backer Considers What Comes Next

Jill Stein’s Play to the Bernie-or-Bust Contingent

In another time, Bernie Sanders—the leader of a primary insurgency that pushed the Democratic Party further to the left than it has been in decades—calling, from the Convention floor, for the nomination of Hillary Clinton would have been hailed as a masterpiece of political stagecraft.  But, in Philadelphia in 2016, in the roiling aftermath of the Sanders campaign, that moment did as much to highlight the divisions within the Party as it did the unity that Sanders intended to display.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Joe Biden and the Democratic Family at the D.N.C.
The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks
A Diehard Bernie Backer Considers What Comes Next

A Diehard Bernie Backer Considers What Comes Next

In the summer of 1964, Donna Cartwright, then a recent high-school graduate known as Don, drove with a friend from Maplewood, New Jersey, to Atlantic City, the site of that year’s Democratic National Convention. Outside the convention hall, the two teen-agers encountered members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, who were protesting their state delegation’s refusal to seat black delegates. Cartwright and her friend joined the picket line for half an hour. “It changed my life,” she told me recently.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Joe Biden and the Democratic Family at the D.N.C.
The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks
Jill Stein’s Play to the Bernie-or-Bust Contingent

Faces of the Democratic National Convention

The photographer Philip Montgomery is covering the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia for The New Yorker, following the events of the Convention hall and the protests outside it.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Joe Biden and the Democratic Family at the D.N.C.
The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks
Jill Stein’s Play to the Bernie-or-Bust Contingent

Worry and the Voters of Philadelphia

Early yesterday evening, a man named Jihad Seifullah walked through the neighborhood of East Falls, in northwest Philadelphia, knocking on doors and talking to people about Hillary Clinton. Seifullah, a tall black man in his mid-thirties, is calm and serious, and his approach is not so much to persuade people to change their views as it is to impress upon them the great weight of this election. Seifullah is on the staff of Working America, the political organizing arm of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which endorsed Clinton and has been alarmed by the Donald Trump campaign’s incursions among the white working class. So Seifullah, who is in charge of Working America’s canvassers in southeastern Pennsylvania, was going out, along with about a hundred and fifty others, to study these changes and to offer a prophylaxis against them.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Joe Biden and the Democratic Family at the D.N.C.
The Real Paranoia-Inducing Purpose of Russian Hacks
Jill Stein’s Play to the Bernie-or-Bust Contingent

China’s Real Disasters—and the Rumors They Inspire

Past midnight on July 19th, Zhang Erqiang, a villager living outside Xingtai, about two hundred and fifty miles southwest of Beijing, tossed and turned in bed. Outside, the rain spat against the window in angry, unrelenting sheets. Zhang’s house was close to the Qili river, but earlier in the day he had received assurance from village leaders that flood evacuation was unnecessary. Still, Zhang eyed the savage swell of the river water, visible from his bedroom, and, at around two in the morning, roused his sleeping wife and children. It was too late. Before Zhang could pack his family into the car, the water had already streamed into the vehicle. His wife and ten-year-old daughter could barely pry the door open against the pressure of the water to let Zhang out of the driver’s seat. “The car roof!” Zhang remembers shouting, one arm wrapped around his six-year-old son. His wife, who held onto their daughter, clambered atop the car—the highest flat surface available—but the family was tossed off in a matter of seconds. In the water, which washed the parents apart from their son and daughter, Zhang saw his children flail and scream before the currents engulfed them. It was the last time he would see them alive.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Remarkable Forgotten Life of H. T. Tsiang
Facebook’s News Feed: Often Changed, Never Great
A Reversal of Cultural Dynamics in Disney’s Shanghai Dream

Does the Snapchat Generation Even Know What Yahoo Is?

The $4.8-billion acquisition of Yahoo—the brand and its Internet properties—by a telephone company, Verizon, is a watershed moment in the history of the Internet. It caps off an era—Web 1.0, for lack of a better term—that will soon be remembered much like telegraphs and rotary phones. Like Verizon’s similar purchase, last year, of another ancient bauble, the once ubiquitous dial-up service AOL, the acquisition of Yahoo speaks mainly to the past. Tomorrow’s Internet users don’t dream of using Yahoo’s properties any more than they do AOL’s. Instead, they lavish their attention on Instagram and Snapchat, Musical.ly and Spotify. And software continues to move in directions far removed from the early Web, as new voice-based interfaces, on devices such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Home, train us to think about the Internet beyond browsers and smartphones.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Verizon Strikers’ Shrinking World
Why Yahoo Couldn’t Adapt to the Smartphone Era
The Section 215 Wrecking Ball