George Packer's Blog, page 199

Why the Remain Campaign Lost the Brexit Vote

To many people around the world, the United Kingdom’s vote, on Thursday, to quit the European Union came as a great shock. But the result, with fifty-two per cent of voters in favor leaving the E.U., shouldn’t have been such a surprise. The fact is, the E.U. has never been particularly popular with ordinary people in the U.K., particularly England, and in the weeks leading up to the vote many opinion polls showed the Leave side with a narrow lead. The financial markets and most commentators, myself included, were assuming that, at the last minute, prudence and risk aversion would generate a swing in favor of Remain. That didn’t happen.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Did the Markets Overreact to Brexit?
Cover Story: Barry Blitt’s “Silly Walk Off a Cliff”
Brexit Should Be a Warning About Donald Trump

Did the Markets Overreact to Brexit?

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

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why the Remain Campaign Lost the Brexit Vote
Cover Story: Barry Blitt’s “Silly Walk Off a Cliff”
Brexit Should Be a Warning About Donald Trump

Brexit Should Be a Warning About Donald Trump

As Donald Trump stood in front of the Trump Turnberry golf resort, in Scotland, the morning after the vote for Brexit, he was asked to contemplate his own place in the world, and his power over the minds of the British. “Do you think anything you said in the United States influenced voters here in Britain when it comes to leaving the E.U.?” a reporter asked, as a bagpiper stood watch. “Good question,” Trump replied, squinting from under a white “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. “If I said yes, total influence, you’d all say, ‘That’s terrible, his ego is terrible,’ right? So I will never say that, Tom. I’d like to give you that one, but I can’t say that.” Donald Trump, once again silenced by his own humility, would answer Brexit questions for a good half hour, in the course of which he did allow that he’d heard talk of “a big parallel” to his own campaign: “People want to take their country back,” he said. “They want to take their borders back. They want to take their monetary back. They want to take a lot of things back.” Most of all, perhaps, “they don’t necessarily want people pouring into their country.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why the Remain Campaign Lost the Brexit Vote
Did the Markets Overreact to Brexit?
Cover Story: Barry Blitt’s “Silly Walk Off a Cliff”

Brexit Makes the U.S. the Last, Best Hope for Liberalism

The map showing the results of the United Kingdom’s vote to exit the European Union was stark. There was a bright bulb of support for Remain in and around London, where sixty per cent of voters supported the status quo. Across the rest of England, the vote was to leave. In the northwest and the West Midlands, analysts suggested that the arrival of migrants had antagonized voters; in the northeast, the decline of mining and manufacturing was said to be the cause; in Wales, no one was really sure. Scotland and Northern Ireland, where voters were less moved by nationalist appeals, preferred to remain, and now the question is whether Scottish politicians will renew last year’s effort to sever their own ties with the U.K. But in England, the dividing line seemed clear: there was London, and then there was everywhere else.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why the Remain Campaign Lost the Brexit Vote
Did the Markets Overreact to Brexit?
Cover Story: Barry Blitt’s “Silly Walk Off a Cliff”

Donald Trump’s Immigrant Mother

In November of 1929, a seventeen-year-old Scotswoman, Mary Anne MacLeod, boarded the S.S. Transylvania in Glasgow, bound for New York City. With a high arching brow and deep, round eyes, MacLeod hailed from Tong, a remote fishing community in the parish of Stornoway, in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. Although the American stock market was in a freefall, Europe, in the shadow of war, was in no better shape. Scots had been emigrating for years, trying to find better opportunities.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Brexit Should Be a Warning About Donald Trump
Brexit Makes the U.S. the Last, Best Hope for Liberalism
Daily Cartoon: Friday, June 24th

A Reversal of Cultural Dynamics in Disney’s Shanghai Dream

Cheerios, Nescafé, and Disney—if you happened to be living in China in the early nineties, those brands likely constituted the coördinates of an impossibly opulent universe that existed mostly on glossy poster boards or the opposite side of the TV screen, reflecting the life you wish you lived. There were other iconic Western emblems, like “Dynasty,” the television series about the proudly capitalistic Carrington clan, whose melodramatic plotline (and magnificent shoulder pads) mesmerized a generation of socialists. But if you were about seven years old, as I was, its narrative of love triangles and corporate succession paled in comparison to the vision of a life in which everyone feasted on Cheerios—ubiquitously advertised but decidedly unaffordable to the masses—sipped “ka-fee,” and, most fabulously for the children, was granted access to a fortified Magic Kingdom. Still, although everyone knew its name, and its vague association with the duck and the mouse, no one I knew had ever visited the fantastical spires of a Disney park. The happiest place on earth evidently was not accessible to China’s people.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Lessons About China and Race from a Detergent Ad
The Maoism of Donald Trump
The Cost of the Cultural Revolution, Fifty Years Later

Clash of Clans Proves That Our Impatience Is Worth Billions

The mobile game Clash of Clans doesn’t look like much. Tiny cartoonish characters mill around a cartoon village on a player’s phone screen, building cute little armies that they let loose on enemy camps. Soldiers auto-hack at buildings, walls, and cannons while the player watches, earning gold and other resources for creating more characters, or more structures, in the village. Often, just when things are going really great for the clan, resources run out; then players have to wait a few hours while the game slowly regenerates gold and elixir, or they can spend four dollars and ninety-nine cents to buy in-game currency and keep playing right away.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Jason Rohrer and the Art of the Video Game
With Firewatch, Olly Moss Brings His Subversive Touch to Video Games
Grand Theft Auto Police Reports, from That Time My Mom Played

Jo Cox, the Brexit Vote, and the Politics of Murder

In the week that passed between the murder of the British Labour M.P. Jo Cox and the day on which Britain voted in the European Union referendum, the people of Cox’s constituency of Batley and Spen needed somewhere to lay their flowers. At first, bouquets and handwritten tributes piled up and spilled across the pavement outside the bright-red door of Cox’s constituency office in Batley. There were soon too many, and the tributes were moved across the street to Market Place, and set outside the stately, mid-Victorian town hall.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why the Remain Campaign Lost the Brexit Vote
Did the Markets Overreact to Brexit?
Cover Story: Barry Blitt’s “Silly Walk Off a Cliff”

Teaching an Orangutan to Breast-Pump

On June 13th, the National Zoo, in Washington, D.C., tweeted a tantalizing photo of a pregnancy stick. The test was positive. The zoo urged followers to visit its Facebook page at two the next afternoon to find out which animal, from among its three hundred species, was expecting a baby. Thousands did so. In a live video feed, zookeepers led viewers through the nonpublic alleys and cages of the Great Ape House until they reached Batang, a nineteen-year-old orangutan with soulful eyes and shaggy auburn hair who likes to craft makeshift hats from old sheets and towels. She is also well trained—and knows who has the treats. Amanda Bania, a primate keeper, fed grapes to Batang through the cage with one hand as she rubbed a gelled-up ultrasound probe across Batang’s belly with the other. The images of a fetus on a laptop monitor were clear.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Washington’s Panda Obsession
Sea-Turtle Season
Endangered Species Light Up the Empire State Building

Brexit Vote Throws Britain and Europe Into Turmoil

At about three-thirty in the morning British time on Friday, Nigel Farage, the loquacious head of the anti-European Union U.K. Independence Party, gave his second public address of the night. The first one, which he delivered around midnight, had been a defiant concession speech. With an exit poll carried out for Sky News and other indicators pointing to a narrow defeat for the Leave side in the eagerly awaited referendum on whether Britain should exit the European Union, Farage had said, “It’s been a long campaign, in my case twenty-five years. But whatever happens in this battle, we are winning the war. . . . Even if we do stay part of this union, it is doomed.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why the Remain Campaign Lost the Brexit Vote
Did the Markets Overreact to Brexit?
Cover Story: Barry Blitt’s “Silly Walk Off a Cliff”