George Packer's Blog, page 204

Donald Trump’s Anti-American Values

In the past two decades, as mass shootings have become commonplace in this country, the candlelit vigil has taken its place, alongside the town hall and the voting booth, as one of the places we most associate with American democracy. A generation of politicians has come of age rehearsing the rituals of public mourning and offering appeals to national unity. These rituals—the congressional moment of silence, the Presidential visit to the site of the outrage—may have become scripted, but they do nod toward the existence of a national ideal and a sense of common concern that overrides political pettiness.

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Related:
Obama’s Defining Attack on Trump and Trumpism
Stonewall After Orlando
Donald Trump Steps on His Own Inflammatory Speech

Obama’s Defining Attack on Trump and Trumpism

This morning, I took a mental-health break from coverage of the attack that took place in Orlando over the weekend. But, at lunchtime, when I turned on NY1 to check the local news, there was President Obama, looking as ticked off and impassioned as we’ve ever seen him. Gone were the lofty detachment and professorial tone that sometimes characterize his oration. In their place were flashing eyes, hand gestures, and a tone that varied from urgency to anger. Speaking for about twenty-five minutes, Obama delivered a ringing defense of his approach to terrorism and a stinging denouncement of Donald Trump and all that he stands for.

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Related:
Donald Trump’s Anti-American Values
Stonewall After Orlando
Donald Trump Steps on His Own Inflammatory Speech

Stonewall After Orlando

The charter of the Society for Human Rights, the first gay-advocacy group in the United States, was granted in 1924, on Christmas Eve. The Society met its demise after only a few months, when the founder, a young ex-soldier named Henry Gerber, was thrown into jail and forced to defend himself in three separate trials. Naturally, he was discouraged, but mainly because of what he’d encountered before his legal strife: “The average homosexual, I found, was ignorant concerning himself. Others were fearful. Still others were frantic or depraved. Some were blasé. Many homosexuals told me that their search for forbidden fruit was the real spice of life. With this argument, they rejected our aims. We wondered how we could accomplish anything with such resistance from our own people.”

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Related:
Donald Trump’s Anti-American Values
Obama’s Defining Attack on Trump and Trumpism
What’s Really Standing in the Way of Gun Control

Why Microsoft Wanted LinkedIn

Microsoft’s announcement, on Monday, that it would purchase LinkedIn—its biggest acquisition ever, at more than twenty-six billion dollars—brought to mind an earlier takeover attempt, almost a decade ago. Back in the mid-aughts, Microsoft’s C.E.O. at the time, Steve Ballmer, flew to Palo Alto to try to convince Mark Zuckerberg, the young C.E.O. of Facebook, to let Microsoft buy his company. During Facebook’s first couple of years, bigger companies had dismissed it, and social networking in general, as a fad for college kids; Zuckerberg had even admitted that he didn’t care how Facebook would eventually make money. But Ballmer, who wanted to catch up to Google in the online-advertising business, was beginning to see Facebook’s power. People were signing up for accounts in extraordinary numbers. If Microsoft could acquire Facebook, it would gain a user base that could eventually rival Google’s—just what advertisers wanted. For this, according to the journalist David Kirkpatrick, Ballmer was willing to pay fifteen billion dollars, far more than Microsoft had ever paid for an acquisition.

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Microsoft’s Very Good Day
Apple: You’ve Seen It All Before, and Nothing Else Like It
Cover Story: “Playdate”

Donald Trump Steps on His Own Inflammatory Speech

After months of running his mouth freely, Donald Trump has evidently hired a proper speechwriter. Coming a day after the horrific attack in Orlando, the address that he delivered in Goffstown, New Hampshire, on Monday afternoon was misleading, malevolent, and inflammatory. But it was also pointed, clear, and carefully tailored to contrast Trump’s bellicose stance on terrorism with the measured response of Hillary Clinton, who, speaking in Cleveland earlier that day, had called for unity, vigilance, outreach to Muslims, and reform of gun-control laws.

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Related:
One Person, One Gun
Donald Trump’s Anti-American Values
Obama’s Defining Attack on Trump and Trumpism

What’s Really Standing in the Way of Gun Control

After the Supreme Court decided District of Columbia v. Heller, in 2008, it appeared that all attempts at gun control might be doomed, as a matter of constitutional law, for the foreseeable future. In an opinion by Antonin Scalia, writing for a five-Justice majority, the Court reversed decades of precedent and asserted that the Second Amendment guaranteed an individual the right to possess firearms (discounting the amendment’s reference to “a well regulated militia”). So, in light of monstrosities like the massacre in Orlando, are the state, local, and federal governments powerless to pass laws that restrict the purchase, possession, and use of guns?

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An Act of Hate in a Place of Gay Pride
Gun Laws and Terrorism: An American Nightmare
The Orlando Shootings and American Muslims

Gawker Was a Great Place to Become a Journalist

At 8 P.M. on October 27, 2009, I sat at my desk in the hallway that I used as an office in my Brooklyn apartment and stared at a blank field on my computer screen where I could type words and hit “publish” and the words would instantly appear on a Web site read by tens of thousands of people. It was the first day of my three-shift tryout as the night editor of Gawker.

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How Peter Thiel’s Gawker Battle Could Open a War Against the Press
The Week in Business: Thiel’s Crusade, a Brief T.S.A. Success, and More
What Two Forgotten Pieces Tell Us About Harper Lee

An Act of Hate in a Place of Gay Pride

When President Barack Obama addressed the nation on Sunday, just hours after the worst mass shooting in American history, he tried to untangle what was known about the motives of the murderer. “Although it’s still early in the investigation,” he said, speaking from the White House, “we know enough to say that this was an act of terror and an act of hate.” The shooter, Omar Siddiqui Mateen, had claimed allegiance to ISIS in a call to 911 before killing forty-nine people. He took an assault rifle and a handgun into Pulse, a popular gay bar—billed as “Orlando’s Premier Gay Night Club”—during gay-pride month. The choice of target does not seem coincidental.

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Related:
What’s Really Standing in the Way of Gun Control
Gun Laws and Terrorism: An American Nightmare
The Orlando Shootings and American Muslims

Gun Laws and Terrorism: An American Nightmare

On Sunday, around lunchtime, I took my two daughters and our puppy to a dog park in Brooklyn Heights, near the East River. It was a fine, breezy day, and throngs of people were strolling along the raised promenade, which provides a view of New York Harbor and downtown Manhattan. With Americans of all colors and creeds enjoying the sunshine, I felt like I was in an urban version of a Norman Rockwell painting.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What’s Really Standing in the Way of Gun Control
An Act of Hate in a Place of Gay Pride
The Orlando Shootings and American Muslims

The Orlando Shootings and American Muslims

Hena Khan, the author of best-selling children’s books, thought Muhammad Ali’s funeral on Friday was going to be a turning point for American Muslims. “Ali spent his life trying to show the real Islam—battling Islamophobia even as he battled Parkinson’s disease. That’s what was highlighted after he died,” she told me this weekend. “It was nice to feel proud—and to see people saying ‘Allahu Akbar’ interpreted in a positive way.”

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Donald Trump’s Exploitation of Orlando
Do F.B.I. Stings Help the Fight Against ISIS?
What Can the U.S. Learn from Radicalization in the French-Speaking World?