George Packer's Blog, page 192

The Huge Challenge Facing Theresa May

Compared to the laborious process of replacing an American President, the British system of transferring power is very rapid. On Wednesday afternoon, David Cameron, the Prime Minister for the past six years, was driven from Downing Street to Buckingham Palace, where he submitted his resignation to the Queen, a formality that goes back centuries. About an hour later, the metal gates that separate Downing Street from Whitehall were opened again, this time to admit the new Prime Minister, Theresa May, who had also been to the Palace, where she had formally accepted the job that, as the new leader of the ruling Conservative Party, she was constitutionally entitled to take up.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Hillary Clinton’s Scandal Mistake
The Rise of Theresa May and the Decline of British Politics
How the N.B.A.’s Salary Cap Favors Talent-Rich Teams

What Have the Freddie Gray Trials Achieved?

Three Baltimore police officers have been tried for killing Freddie Gray, and none have been convicted. These trials took place in a city radicalized by Gray’s death and during a summer when the pattern of police officers killing African-American men around the country has not ceased, but the protests in Baltimore have been muted. The third trial, of an officer named Caesar Goodson, was considered the signal one. Goodson faced the heaviest charges, since he drove the paddy wagon in which Gray, his hands and legs shackled but his body not belted in place, was allowed to bounce around, restrained from protecting himself, until he suffered a fatal injury to his spinal cord. There are four more trials to come (three defendants have not yet had their cases brought to court, and a fourth, William Porter, is scheduled for a retrial this fall). But Goodson’s acquittal, on June 22nd, indicated that the most serious charges are not likely to end in convictions. Whatever justice for Freddie Gray’s death looks like, it will probably not involve long prison sentences for cops.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Remembering Sandra Bland’s Death in the Place I Call Home
Baltimore and the Future of Protest Politics
A Freddie Gray Mistrial

Remembering Sandra Bland’s Death in the Place I Call Home

Last summer, I travelled with my infant daughter from our apartment in Brooklyn to Dixie, Georgia, to spend a month with my mother-in-law, whom I affectionately call Mama Marable. Her immaculate three-bedroom brick house sits on twenty-three acres of land, most of which she rents out to local farmers. To get to the house, you have to travel on a farm road for about a mile, past an Ag-Pro dealership that sells John Deere farm equipment, with endless rows of cotton on both sides. The nights are so dark my husband insists that, were his car to break down more than four hundred yards from the house, he would stay put until morning.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Have the Freddie Gray Trials Achieved?
The Supreme Court’s Just Application of the Undue-Burden Standard for Abortion
The Short-Lived Career of an Austin Uber Driver

Hillary Clinton’s Scandal Mistake

Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for President is widely, and aptly, described as historic. Here’s one of the reasons: If she wins, she will have spent a longer time under criminal investigation than any President in history. Why is this? Is she uniquely corrupt? Unduly targeted?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Bernie Sanders’s Fulsome Endorsement of Hillary Clinton
Bernie Sanders’s Philosophical Victory
Daily Cartoon: Friday, July 8th

Bernie Sanders’s Fulsome Endorsement of Hillary Clinton

As one of the hosts and warmup acts at Portsmouth High School, in New Hampshire, on Tuesday morning, Senator Jeanne Shaheen seemed a bit unsure what to say, at least initially. “Go, Bernie, and go, Hillary, right?” she asked the crowd. Then she recovered, saying, “I am so thrilled to have Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders come together in New Hampshire so we can defeat Donald Trump.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Hillary Clinton’s Scandal Mistake
Bernie Sanders’s Philosophical Victory
Daily Cartoon: Friday, July 8th

Tim Duncan’s Parting Bank Shot

The best basketball player of his generation played his final game in the N.B.A. this year. But that player was not Kobe Bryant, of the Los Angeles Lakers, who spent the season on a carefully choreographed, aggressively marketed, and statistically abysmal farewell tour. Instead, it was Tim Duncan, of the San Antonio Spurs, who quietly announced his retirement on Monday, a few weeks after the end of his nineteenth year in the league.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
How the N.B.A.’s Salary Cap Favors Talent-Rich Teams
Editing Kevin Durant
The Conditional Cavaliers Face Elimination Again

American Exposure

On November 22, 1968, which marked the five-year anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, in Dallas, and was seven months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Memphis, a daguerreotype of Frederick Douglass appeared on the cover of Life magazine, for a special issue devoted to “The Search for a Black Past.” I don’t know how to explain why I thought of that photograph while watching Diamond Reynolds’s Facebook video of the police shooting of her boyfriend, Philando Castile. But I did. I’d been sitting at the breakfast table, crying, like so many people, while reading the news about the sniper in Dallas who shot twelve police officers, killing five of them, and had decided not to watch any of the footage of what happened that night for the same reason I’d decided not to watch any of the videos earlier in the week: watching had, oh, three or four murders ago, begun to feel like a kind of complicity, as if we’re all prisoners marched out of our cells and into the prison yard to serve as spectators for the next execution: the gun fires; we flinch; we return, helplessly, to our cells. So I’d skipped the footage of two policemen, in Baton Rouge, shooting Alton Sterling, and I’d swiped past Reynolds’s video, from Minnesota. But then, after reading about the sniper, I thought: maybe watching people shoot one another has become an obligation of American citizenship. So I forced myself to watch. And, as I did, the screen went black—the police had thrown down Reynolds’s phone, and put her in handcuffs—and you could only hear voices, the muted, distant sound of Reynolds crying and praying, and, closer, the urgent voice of her four-year-old daughter, and right then I remembered that photograph of Douglass.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Police Shootings, Race, and the Fear Defense
After Dallas, The Future of Black Lives Matter
Obama and Trump After Dallas

It’s the End of the U.F.C. as We Know It

Late on Saturday night, Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, delivered an uncharacteristically measured assessment of the evening’s entertainment. The U.F.C. had finally staged U.F.C. 200, a landmark night of mixed martial arts, televised on pay-per-view, which the company had been hyping all year. “Tonight’s fights—y’know,” he said, not very enthusiastically. “We had some great fights, and there were some decent fights.” True, Miesha Tate, the bantamweight champion and one of the company’s biggest stars, had suffered a memorable upset to Amanda Nunes, who stunned her with a battery of punches and then choked her into submission; Tate lost both her championship belt and a good quantity of blood, which dripped from what remained of her nose. But there were relatively few thrilling moments; even White, known for expressions of pugnacious enthusiasm, had to admit that the night was a bit of a letdown.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Unexpected Challenge: Roger Federer’s Wimbledon Quarterfinal Victory
Marcus Willis’s (Very) Brief Wimbledon Fairy Tale
Bill Simmons Finally Looks Good on Television

It’s the End of the U.F.C. As We Know It

Late on Saturday night, Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, delivered an uncharacteristically measured assessment of the evening’s entertainment. The U.F.C. had finally staged U.F.C. 200, a landmark night of mixed martial arts, televised on pay-per-view, which the company had been hyping all year. “Tonight’s fights—y’know,” he said, not very enthusiastically. “We had some great fights, and there were some decent fights.” True, Miesha Tate, the bantamweight champion and one of the company’s biggest stars, had suffered a memorable upset to Amanda Nunes, who stunned her with a battery of punches and then choked her into submission; Tate lost both her championship belt and a good quantity of blood, which dripped from what remained of her nose. But there were relatively few thrilling moments; even White, known for expressions of pugnacious enthusiasm, had to admit that the night was a bit of a letdown.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Unexpected Challenge: Roger Federer’s Wimbledon Quarterfinal Victory
Marcus Willis’s (Very) Brief Wimbledon Fairy Tale
Bill Simmons Finally Looks Good on Television

Police Shootings, Race, and the Fear Defense

Within the ongoing story about race and killings by police there has been, from the beginning, a second story, about fear. For the shooters themselves, fear has been essential to their legal defense; it has also been, in a more basic way, their explanation. The situation was pressured; they could not control the person in front of them; violence seemed imminent and they were scared. When police interviewed neighborhood-watchman George Zimmerman the day after he killed Trayvon Martin, the officers seemed to expect that fear would be Zimmerman’s explanation even before he offered it himself. “Did you confront the guy you shot?” they asked Zimmerman in a formal interview. “No,” Zimmerman said. “Were you in fear for your life?” “Yes.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
American Exposure
After Dallas, The Future of Black Lives Matter
“Our Country Is Better Than That”: Two Responses to Tragedy