George Packer's Blog, page 203

Love Jihad: Orlando and Gay Muslims

When he was twenty-five, Naveed Merchant, tormented by the tension between his Islamic faith and his homosexuality, swallowed almost three hundred Tylenol pills. His mother and brother found him and rushed him to an emergency room in Southern California. “But the struggle was not over just because I told them I was gay,” he recalled, two decades later. “I believed that I brought enormous shame on my family and that I’d never amount to anything—and so I should just die. Every time I tried to be straight, to fake being straight, I would get more depressed and it would lead me to a suicidal ideation.”

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Related:
Terror Begins at Home
One Person, One Gun
Stonewall After Orlando

There’s Now a Soda Tax in Philadelphia, but Not Because Sugar Is Bad for You

Four years ago, a city-council member in Richmond, California, got his colleagues to put a measure on the local ballot asking voters to impose an extra tax on sugary drinks like soda. The council member, Jeff Ritterman, had special insight into how sugar was ruining his neighbors’ health. Before becoming a politician, he’d spent nearly thirty years as the chief of cardiology at Kaiser Permanente’s campus in Richmond, a bleak industrial town north of Berkeley, where the biggest employer is a Chevron refinery and many residents are poor. As in other communities with similar demographics, half of Richmond’s children were overweight or obese. It was clear to Ritterman that this had a lot to do with their sugar consumption. Taxing soda, one of the biggest sources of sugar in children’s diets, seemed like a sensible response.

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Related:
Pope Francis After America
Francis in Philadelphia
The Plot Against Trains

Cuomo and B.D.S.: Can New York State Boycott a Boycott?

Last week, Governor Andrew Cuomo, of New York, signed an executive order directing state agencies to stop doing business with any institution or company that supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (B.D.S.) movement, which aims to pressure Israel to reform its policies toward Palestinians. Cuomo portrayed the new policy as a simple tit for tat. “If you boycott against Israel, New York will boycott you,” he said at New York City’s Harvard Club, in a speech announcing the new policy.

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Related:
Daily Cartoon: Monday, May 11th
The Case to Release the Garner Grand-Jury Records
Cuomo’s Snow Day

The Conditional Cavaliers Face Elimination Again

Toward the end of Game 5 of the N.B.A. Finals, on Monday night, the commentator Mark Jackson, inspired by the Cleveland Cavaliers’ spectacular two-fronted attack, pluralized his most famous exclamation: “Momma,” he roared, “there go those men!” If the Cavs somehow manage to claim the title, staving off death by blue-and-gold confetti two more unlikely times, the Warriors will have the heroics of those men—LeBron James and his smaller, shot-happy sidekick Kyrie Irving—to blame. Their duelling-solos act, good for a combined eighty-two points on Monday, has, over the course of the Finals, revealed itself as the key trait of this Cavs team. When they win, they do so not by especially impressive movement—of the ball or of players without it—or by intricate defensive scheming but by the irrefutable and occasionally unstoppable talents of their two best players. This creates a slight difficulty for our current, obsessively “X”-and-“O”-focussed sports media: little of the usual talk of “adjustments” and “tweaks” seems to pertain. If LeBron’s and Kyrie’s shots are falling, the team is almost invincible. If they aren’t, they aren’t at all.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Steve Kerr and His Mother Talk About the Legacy of His Father’s Assassination
For the Golden State Warriors, Brain-Zapping Could Provide an Edge
Cavs Replace “All In” Slogan with Quote from Jean-Paul Sartre

Steve Kerr and His Mother Talk About the Legacy of His Father’s Assassination

Last week, I spoke on the phone with Ann Kerr, the longtime manager of the Fulbright Scholar Enrichment Program at U.C.L.A. and the mother of the Golden State Warriors’ coach, Steve Kerr. Ann and I had originally been scheduled to talk a few days earlier, but there was a shooting on the U.C.L.A. campus—a former Ph.D. student had killed an engineering professor and then himself—and we’d had to postpone.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Conditional Cavaliers Face Elimination Again
For the Golden State Warriors, Brain-Zapping Could Provide an Edge
LeBron James Versus the New Basketball Gods

Terror Begins at Home

Soon after Sunday’s massacre in Orlando, Omar Mateen’s first wife, Sitora Yusufiy, told reporters that when she was briefly married to him, seven years ago, he made a practice of abusing her. “He would just come home and start beating me up because the laundry wasn’t finished or something like that,” Yusufiy said. The couple had met online, and she had moved to Florida to marry him, but the beatings began almost immediately, and he was soon preventing her from speaking to her family, “keeping me hostage from them,” she said. In the end, her family had to rescue her, physically pulling her out of his arms, she said.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s Unrecognizable America
One Person, One Gun
Donald Trump’s Anti-American Values

A Former Soldier Explains Why Trump Was Wrong About the Troops

On Tuesday, Donald Trump held a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina. The stump speech was of the usual fare—“Crooked Hillary,” the border wall, the lyrics to Al Wilson’s “The Snake.” Some of the invective was framed around the tragic events in Orlando last weekend, but for the most part Trump stuck to his usual themes. Then, while discussing the war in Iraq, Trump remarked, “How about bringing baskets of money, millions of millions of dollars, and handing it out? I wanna know, who are the soldiers that had that job? Because I think they’re living very well right now, whoever they may be.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump’s Unrecognizable America
Donald Trump’s Anti-American Values
Obama’s Defining Attack on Trump and Trumpism

LinkedIn and the Modern Worker’s Wandering Eye

Microsoft announced plans to purchase LinkedIn for $26.2 billion on Monday—its biggest acquisition ever—so, with renewed curiosity, I logged onto the network for the first time in some weeks. On the alert bar, fifteen “pending invitations” had been flagged for me, along with messages I had neglected to reply to and a notice that my profile had been viewed by seventy-one users, two with the title “Customer Service Specialist.” Good news, I guess. Since LinkedIn’s founding, in 2002, many users have approached the network with the same operational knowledge they bring to their microwave ovens: there are many buttons to press, and presumably they do something for knowledgeable people, but most of us just flip the thing on for some ninety seconds of résumé-stalking. Ding! Or, in the case of LinkedIn, Ding! Ding! Ding! The service’s pesky e-mails have become the stuff of comedy and lore.

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Related:
Why Microsoft Wanted LinkedIn
Microsoft’s Very Good Day
Apple: You’ve Seen It All Before, and Nothing Else Like It

Trump’s Unrecognizable America

“The Muslims have to work with us,” Donald Trump said on Monday, in his speech responding to the slaughter of forty-nine people at Pulse, a gay night club in Orlando, by a twenty-nine-year-old Muslim-American security guard. He repeated, “They have to work with us. They know what’s going on. They know that he was bad. They knew that the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what? They didn’t turn them in. And you know what? We had death, and destruction.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Terror Begins at Home
A Former Soldier Explains Why Trump Was Wrong About the Troops
Donald Trump’s Anti-American Values

One Person, One Gun

“One person did that?” a woman was asking quietly into her cell phone on Sunday afternoon, in a supermarket on the Upper East Side. One didn’t have to wonder what “that” was. Forty-nine people were dead in Orlando, a new record in the special American Olympics of murder in a mass shooting. Once again, the grief of the families was unbearable—to the images of cell phones ringing in the pockets of dead kids at Virginia Tech we can now add the last, desperate texts a young man exchanged with his mother. “Mommy I love you”; “Call police”; “Now.”; “He’s coming”; “I’m gonna die.” “Text me please,” she wrote back to her child, as she called 911. And then, after he had stopped texting back: “Are u hurt?”; “I love u.” She now knows that an answer will never arrive. Her son, Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, who was thirty, has been added to the list of the dead.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump Steps on His Own Inflammatory Speech
Hate, Terror, and Guns in Orlando
Donald Trump’s Exploitation of Orlando