George Packer's Blog, page 200

Bill Simmons Finally Looks Good on Television

The first episode of the sportswriter Bill Simmons’s new weekly half-hour talk show, “Any Given Wednesday,” on HBO, has so far been discussed, and most likely will be remembered, for the appearance of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-raised actor Ben Affleck, who, during an interview, delivered a five-minute near-monologue defending the New England Patriots quarterback, Tom Brady, against the N.F.L. and its commissioner, Roger Goodell, in the still-ongoing Deflategate scandal. Among other colorful takes, Affleck called it “the ultimate bullshit fucking outrage of sports, ever.” Gossip and entertainment writers, who often lament that celebrities have become too buttoned up and managed, love to pounce when a star lets loose—or, in this case, when a tabloid king likens a sports controversy to the tragedy of “Macbeth,” where “everyone dies in the end.” TMZ declared that Affleck was “slurring and ranting”; Deadspin called his diatribe “insane.” Viewers concluded on social media that Affleck must have been drunk, forming such a unified chorus that Simmons was compelled to clarify, in a tweet, that Affleck was merely “fired up,” and that the segment had been filmed in the late morning.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Gordie Howe Was the Ideal Canadian Athlete
How “Silicon Valley” Nails Silicon Valley
Muhammad Ali at Fighter’s Heaven

Britain Votes, Maybe for the Last Time, on Whether to Stand Alone

Some countries love referendums. The Swiss, for instance, can hardly decide which side of bed to get out of in the mornings, let alone what color stripe is permissible on the seams of their ski pants, without putting such urgent questions to the popular vote. There was a Swiss referendum this past February, comprising four separate propositions, and another on June 5th, which offered five more initiatives, one of them asking the good folk of Switzerland whether they approved of a basic income for every citizen. (Most of them said no.) A third referendum will swing by in September. This, some will argue, is democracy in action, although democracy may be so exhausted by all the action that it will feel like going back to bed with a box of milk chocolates, rich in Alpine goodness.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Do the Brexit Movement and Donald Trump Have in Common?
Fighting Brexit, with Six Hundred Croissants
Murder of British M.P. Heightens Uncertainty Over Brexit Vote

An Unexpected Victory for Affirmative Action

Affirmative action lives. That’s the emphatic message of the Supreme Court’s decision today in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which found that an affirmative-action plan that considers race, among other factors, in college admissions is constitutional.

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Donald Trump’s Anti-American Values
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What Donald Trump Thinks Judges Are Good For

Gun Control and the Art of the Sit-In

“The point here, Wolf, is that this is a publicity stunt,” Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, told Wolf Blitzer, of CNN, at about 6 P.M. on Wednesday, explaining why he was ignoring calls for an up-or-down House vote on gun-control legislation. House Democrats, in an operation that began with an impassioned speech by Representative John Lewis, had been holding a sit-in for six hours, in an attempt to force such a vote. One goal of the legislation was to make it harder for people on terrorist watch lists to acquire guns. (This is known as No Fly, No Buy.) Ryan put on what he regards, perhaps, as a wry smile, and explained that he was just protecting Americans’ constitutional rights. Blitzer asked what the harm would be in just putting it up for a vote. “This isn’t trying to come up with a solution to a problem,” Ryan said. “This is trying to get attention.” Meanwhile, on the House floor, representatives were chanting, making speeches, and singing; after a couple of attempts to regain control, the Republican leadership had formally called a recess, but the sit-in continued. (The recess meant that the C-SPAN cameras were off, but “tech-savvy” members, as Nancy Pelosi called them, set up streaming video with Periscope.) Representative after representative told the story of a constituent who had died of gun violence—stories that they did, indeed, seem to believe demanded some attention. Many held up pictures of small children.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
How the Gun Industry Sells Self-Defense
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, June 21st
Charleston and America, One Year Later

What Do the Brexit Movement and Donald Trump Have in Common?

If things go as expected on Thursday, British voters will reject the option of leaving the European Union. Likewise, if things go as expected come November, American voters will reject the option of electing a President Trump. Both outcomes would be reassuring, but they wouldn’t mean the end of right-wing populism on either side of the Atlantic—they may merely represent new high-water marks.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Britain Votes, Maybe for the Last Time, on Whether to Stand Alone
Donald Trump and the “Amazing” Alex Jones
Fighting Brexit, with Six Hundred Croissants

Donald Trump and the “Amazing” Alex Jones

On December 2nd, while the awful news from San Bernardino was erupting, bit by unconfirmed bit, I was surprised by the crisp self-assurance of a couple of bloggers whose names were new to me. They were on it—number of victims, names of shooters, police-radio intercepts. Soon, though, the bloggers veered off from the story that other news sources were slowly, frantically putting together. The information being released by the authorities did not match the information the bloggers were unearthing, and the latter quickly deduced that, like other “mass shootings” staged by the government, in Newtown, Connecticut, and elsewhere, this was a “false flag” operation. The official account was fiction. One Web site that carried the work of these “reporters” was called Infowars. I made do with other sources for news. But I kept an eye on Infowars and its proprietor, Alex Jones, who is a conspiracy theorist and radio talk-show host in Austin, Texas. Jones’s guest on his show the morning of the shooting had been, as chance would have it, Donald Trump. Jones had praised Trump, claiming that ninety per cent of his listeners were Trump supporters, and Trump had returned the favor, saying, “Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Do the Brexit Movement and Donald Trump Have in Common?
Donald Trump’s Scandalous Clintons-Scandals Speech
Cash-Strapped Trump Campaign Auctions Chris Christie on eBay

Donald Trump’s Scandalous Clintons-Scandals Speech

At the Trump SoHo Hotel, on Wednesday, Donald Trump offered what is likely to be the central argument of his general-election campaign against Hillary Clinton: “They totally own her, and that will never, ever change, including if she ever became President, God help us.” The identity of the Clinton owners—the “they” in Trump’s charge—is at once multifarious and vague. It includes, to mention a few of the entities that Trump brought up in his speech, “big donors,” “Wall Street banks,” “oppressive regimes,” lobbyists, special interests, a foreign telecom company, the Sultan of Brunei, the King of Saudi Arabia, “her financial backers in Communist China,” and other, unspecified foreign powers who, he is certain, have hacked her private e-mail server, which he figures she set up in order to hide her “corrupt dealings” while she was Secretary of State. “So they probably now have a blackmail file over someone who wants to be President of the United States,” Trump said. “We can’t hand over our government to someone whose deepest, darkest secrets may be in the hands of our enemies. Can’t do it.” Instead, Trump recommends handing it over to Trump, someone whose deepest, darkest impulses aren’t secrets at all.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Hillary Clinton’s Personal E-Mails to Me
Cash-Strapped Trump Campaign Auctions Chris Christie on eBay
Getting Serious About Trumponomics

The Surprising Relevance of the Baltic Dry Index

On January 11th of this year, online financial circles lit up with dire news. “Commerce between Europe and North America has literally come to a halt,” one blogger wrote. “For the first time in known history, not one cargo ship is in-transit in the North Atlantic between Europe and North America. . . . It is a horrific economic sign; proof that commerce is literally stopped.” Although the Web site that first broadcast this information is prone to hysteria—there are, in fact, many cargo ships on the world’s oceans, in plain sight—more pessimistic market experts, such as Zero Hedge and the Dollar Vigilante, eagerly quoted it for their millions of readers. The story fit neatly into a narrative: the global economy, despite outward signs that it has clawed its way back from recession, is a small step away from an enormous crash.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Economic Arguments Against Brexit
Raghuram Rajan and the Dangers of Helicopter Money
Bernie Sanders and the Realists

How the Gun Industry Sells Self-Defense

Americans own three hundred and ten million firearms—roughly one gun per person. No other country has anywhere near that rate of civilian gun ownership. (No. 2 is Yemen, where the rate is half that of the U.S.) But the motivations behind America’s gun habit have changed dramatically over the years, shaped partly by world events and partly by the business of selling firearms. Why do Americans buy guns in such large numbers? How do they expect to use them? How have gun manufacturers avoided more stringent gun control? We spoke to gun owners, manufacturers, lobbyists, and their critics about the history and future of guns in America.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
How the N.R.A. Uses Fear to Sell Guns
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, June 21st
Charleston and America, One Year Later

Forget Congress—The Gun Business Faces a Judge

On the seventh day, Congress rested. A week after returning to Washington following the Orlando massacre, with funerals still underway from the lone-gunman case with the highest death toll in American history, the Senate chose to do nothing that might prevent something like it from happening again. Senators rejected four separate gun-safety bills that would have expanded background checks and made it harder for terrorism suspects to buy guns. The failure of the votes on Monday, and the failure of the body itself to perform more than a pantomime of governing, surprised nobody: not the senators or their staffs, not the gun-rights activists or the gun-control activists, not the parents of gunfire victims or the survivors of previous massacres, who have, in recent years, taken to wandering the halls of the Capitol in hopes of capturing the conscience of a public servant. The only thing that ever changes is the number of the grieving, because there is always a new massacre. Erica Lafferty Smegielski, whose mother was the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School, where a gunman killed twenty children and six adults, in 2012, told the Times that “every time we come together for something like this, there is someone new we are introduced to for the first time.” In despair, Florida’s Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, said after the vote, “What am I going to tell forty-nine grieving families? I am going to tell them the N.R.A. won again.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Lessons from the Justice Department’s Orlando Transcript Bungling
Cover Story: “Love,” by Frank Viva
Terror Begins at Home