George Packer's Blog, page 185

America First, for Charles Lindbergh and Donald Trump

When the New York Times interviewed Donald Trump in March, one of the reporters, David Sanger, suggested that Trump’s foreign policy could be summed up as “America First”—“a mistrust of many foreigners, both our adversaries and some of our allies, a sense that they’ve been freeloading off of us for many years.”

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Hall of Fame Caps That Could Have Been

Mike Piazza, the twelve-time All-Star who holds the record for the most home runs hit by a catcher, was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame this weekend. He became only the second inductee to be depicted wearing a New York Mets cap in the portrait on his commemorative plaque. I’m a native New Yorker and Mets fan since childhood, so it feels sacrilegious to admit that I think Piazza should have beeen immortalized as a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers, where he played the first half of his dazzling career.

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Tim Kaine, en Español

On June 11, 2013, Tim Kaine requested permission to do something unprecedented on the Senate’s floor. “I ask unanimous consent that I be able to deliver a floor speech on immigration reform in Spanish,” Kaine said. With permission granted, he started to talk about the importance of the language he had learned while performing missionary work in Honduras as a twenty-two-year-old. “This is a language that has been spoken in this country ever since Spanish missionaries founded San Agustín, Florida (today’s Saint Augustine), in 1565,” he explained. “Close to forty million Americans speak the language today.” Kaine then congratulated the group of senators who had crafted S.744, the ultimately unsuccessful bipartisan immigration-reform bill that would later be dryly known as the Gang of Eight bill. During fourteen minutes of uninterrupted, effortless Spanish, Kaine laid out how immigration reform would work under the bill, including a nuanced description of border security, while making an argument for the benefits of both high- and low-skilled immigration into the United States. Kaine concluded on a conciliatory note: “We will show our country and the world that this piece of legislation is not Republican or Democratic but, rather, strongly bipartisan and American.”

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Leslie Jones and Twitter’s Troll Economics

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

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Three Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Chose Tim Kaine

On Friday, word that Hillary Clinton would pick Senator Tim Kaine, of Virginia, as her running mate spread across the Internet, accompanied by a chilly reaction from some quarters. There have been complaints from the left that Kaine isn’t progressive enough, which isn’t exactly surprising. (The Warren wing of the Democratic Party isn’t so-named for nothing: it wanted Elizabeth Warren to get the job.) Some Hispanic groups were sure to be disappointed if Clinton didn’t pick a Latino, which is understandable, too. And some journalists have complained that Kaine isn’t an exciting enough choice—a recent headline at The New Republic read, “Tim Kaine Is Too Boring To Be Clinton’s Running Mate.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Watching Another Attempted Coup in Turkey with My Mother

Being Turkish means worrying about your country all the time. We are unable to stop fretting about our motherland, as though she were an eccentric relative one could neither fully trust on her own nor stop loving. As a nation, we are used to anxiety, panic attacks, depression, and melancholy. And blind rage: there is plenty of that, too. I once heard a friend declare that the scientific community should look into “the extraordinary Turkish immune system” to research how we have developed resistance to scandals and traumas that would have sent other societies reeling. While I don’t quite like the nationalistic boasting in his assessment, I know what he means. Collectively, we have been overloaded with too much stress for too long.

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What Does NATO Do, Anyway?

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, the largest and most powerful military alliance in history, is not usually fodder for election-year politicking. But in an interview with the Times earlier this week, Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump said that the United States should not automatically honor NATO’s core principle of mutual defense, specifically if Russia invaded several newer members of the alliance, the three strategic Baltic states and former Soviet republics—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. In a sharp rebuke, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Thursday that the principle of mutual defense is “ironclad.” He told reporters, “There should be no mistake or miscalculation made about this country’s commitment to the transatlantic alliance.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The First Family of Competitive Lumberjacking

Last weekend, members of the first family of the American forest, the Cogars, visited the Chicago area for one of competitive lumberjacking’s marquee events, the Stihl Timbersports Series’ U.S. Championships. A Cogar had won the national title seven of the previous eight years, and no one was surprised when a Cogar took home the title this year, too. Stihl is the major leagues of lumberjacking; its events are televised and plastered with corporate advertising, but they’re not where you would travel to find the soul of competitive lumberjacking. That would be Webster Springs, West Virginia, the place where the Cogars prefer for taking it out and chopping it up.

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Stephen Colbert’s Joyful Return to Political Comedy

During this election cycle, it has often felt as though the country’s politically inclined late-night talk-show hosts have been sitting in the wrong chairs, or else sadly absent altogether. Sure, John Oliver is in the right spot, hectoring gleefully at HBO. But Samantha Bee, who is doing a superhero’s work just once a week on TBS, really ought to be killing it nightly as the host of “The Daily Show.” Stephen Colbert, who for almost a year has been trying to find his footing as David Letterman’s replacement on CBS’s “Late Show,” should be back in character at Comedy Central, satirizing this wayward iteration of the Republican Party with fulsome, ignorant praise. As for Letterman, he’s tending to a beard when he might still be presiding as the country’s elder comedic statesman, wryly brutalizing Donald Trump, whom, in a recent TV interview, he called “despicable.” Speaking of beards, there’s Jon Stewart’s. Save for a cranky appearance on David Axelrod’s politics podcast in May, Stewart has mostly been silent this year, away building an animal sanctuary in New Jersey.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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In Cleveland, the American Dream Melts Away

On July 19th, a four-thousand-pound ice sculpture spelling out the words “The American Dream” was unveiled at Cleveland’s Transformer Station, blocks away from the site of the Republican National Convention. The sculpture, which was thirty feet wide and five feet tall, melted away throughout the day.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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