George Packer's Blog, page 205

Hate, Terror, and Guns in Orlando

In the hours after the deadliest mass shooting in American history, which killed fifty people and wounded fifty-three others at a gay night club in Orlando, Americans began the ritual of separating our strands of shame after a mass killing. In this case, we are apportioning an armed man’s actions to the influence of ISIS, homophobia, mental instability, and the availability of high-powered weapons.

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Related:
Donald Trump’s Exploitation of Orlando
Donald Trump and the Stunts That Expose the G.O.P.
Bernie Sanders, Guns, and the Idea of Vermont

Donald Trump’s Exploitation of Orlando

In the rhetoric of Donald Trump, mendacity and cynicism compete for equal time. It is hard to say which prevailed today as the Republican Party standard-bearer, a man who pretends to the most powerful political office in the land, tweeted this at his followers: “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism.”

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Related:
The Orlando Shootings and American Muslims
Hate, Terror, and Guns in Orlando
Do F.B.I. Stings Help the Fight Against ISIS?

What Tech’s Unicorn Cult Can Learn from the Art World

In the thirty-one months since the investor Aileen Lee popularized the term “unicorn” as shorthand for a startup technology company worth a billion dollars or more, the concept has gone from novelty to gestalt to frenzy to trouble to embarrassment. Some unicorns have been sold for a fraction of their once-billion-dollar values. Others have had investors mark down the value of their stakes. A few, like the blood-testing company Theranos, have been accused of fraud, hinting at a rot beneath other startups. But one transformation wrought by the unicorn phenomenon endures: where company valuations used to be concerns that were tertiary to their identity, how much a company is worth now defines it. This change looks an awful lot like what has happened in the world of art. Later this week, for example, artists, curators, gallerists, and buyers will assemble at the blingiest of the art world’s annual big-money fairs, Art Basel, in Switzerland. The wealth on display, and the market’s influence on how the work is received, has become, over the decades, a permanent feature of the event.

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HBO’s “Silicon Valley”: The Gayest Straight Show on TV
Postscript: Bill Campbell, 1940-2016
The Breathless Rhetoric (and Prosaic Economics) of Virtual Reality

How Online Ticket Scalping (Eventually) Helped “Hamilton”

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

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The Week in Business: Thiel’s Crusade, a Brief T.S.A. Success, and More
The Short-Lived Career of an Austin Uber Driver
Why Banks Don’t Play It Safe, Even When It Costs Them

A New Way for the Wealthy to Shop for Citizenships

Earlier this month, at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Zurich, Switzerland, the consulting firm Henley & Partners held a press conference to unveil its latest contribution to the international citizenship marketplace. The company, whose main business is helping wealthy individuals find new homes for themselves and their money, publishes a popular annual ranking of the relative worth of every passport in the world. But, at the press conference, the company’s leaders announced that they had created a new measurement ranking, better suited to the modern world: the Henley & Partners-Kochenov Quality of Nationality Index, or Q.N.I.

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Related:
The Economic Arguments Against Brexit

Race, Activism, and Hillary Clinton at Wellesley

The two things that are said perhaps most often about Janet Hill—that she is a lawyer and that she was Hillary Clinton’s roommate at Wellesley College, in the late sixties—are not true. “That legend was started by the sportscaster Dick Vitale, in 1991,” she said recently, of the Clinton story. Hill’s son Grant was then a star at Duke; he would become a star in the N.B.A. as well, and is now a basketball analyst for Turner Sports. “He focussed all the time on Calvin,” Hill continued, referring to her husband, a retired N.F.L. star. “Then, one day, his cameraman widened the shot—and there I was. Dick said, ‘Oh, my God, there’s Grant’s mother! She went to Wellesley with her roommate Hillary Clinton! She’s a lawyer in Washington, in the Bush Administration!’ The only correct part is: I’m Grant’s mom and I went to Wellesley. Hillary and I were just good friends there.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Cover Story: Hillary Clinton, “Ready for a Fight”
Daily Cartoon: Friday, June 10th
How to Feel the G.O.P.’s Pain Over Donald Trump

A Surprising Coalition Brings A New Leader To Peru

The economist Pedro Pablo Kuczynski won Peru’s Presidential election this week, beating his rival, Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of a disgraced and imprisoned former President, by the thinnest of margins—a mere thirty-nine thousand votes out of nearly eighteen million cast.  In every sense, Kuczynski is a member of his country’s social, political, and economic élite. Seventy-seven years old, he was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, and at Princeton; he has, at various points in his career, worked at senior levels of the World Bank, been an investment banker on Wall Street and a mine manager in Guinea, and has served as Peru’s Prime Minister, minister of economy and finance, and minister of energy and mines. He is also a onetime student of the Royal College of Music, an accomplished flautist and pianist, and the owner of a white grand piano that once belonged to Noël Coward.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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A Copa América Confession
Postcard from Peru: Boxing for a Dream
Who’s to Blame for Peru’s Gold-Mining Troubles?

Muhammad Ali and His Audience

Muhammad Ali’s funeral is today, in Louisville, Kentucky, and he will be laid to rest as the city’s favorite son. Much has changed since Ali, born Cassius Clay in the segregated South, the grandson of a slave, learned to box, at the age of twelve. After he won the Olympic gold medal, in 1960, Ali returned home to Jim Crow Louisville and found he was still barred from white-only restaurants, and was still called “boy” on the street. The course of his life offers evidence of the many turning points in African-American and American history from the mid-twentieth century to the present.

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Related:
Cover Story: Hillary Clinton, “Ready for a Fight”
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, June 9th
Muhammad Ali at Fighter’s Heaven

Tony Fadell, Nest, and the Failure of a Middle Ground

Tony Fadell is an uncompromising product-design guy who knows how to tell a story. The best story he ever told was about the world’s most boring product—the thermostat—and how a mundane dial to turn the heat up and down could be transformed into a thing of beauty and the portal to a new way of living (and worth spending two hundred and fifty dollars on). He told a story about a home—one with connected smoke detectors and security cameras, too—that would sense our presence, respond to our every need, and make the planet greener at the same time, a haven run by a data-connected Internet of Things. Google bought that story, in the form of Fadell’s company, Nest, for $3.2 billion, two years ago. But Google wasn’t buying just the company; it was also buying Fadell. A close confidant of Steve Jobs, Fadell had been mentored in the art of beautiful and elegant products by the master himself.

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Related:
Google Home: A Device for Our Post-Device Future
Google’s Relationship with Payday Loans: It’s Complicated
The Week in Business: Silicon Valley vs. Regulation, Fed Politics, and More

The Perils and Promises of Gene-Drive Technology

What if, with a wave of the wand, we could eliminate some of the world’s most devastating causes of illness and death? First, we might fight over which of our many maladies causes the most harm. Cardiovascular disease kills more people every year than any other, but it almost always develops over a lifetime: heart attacks may be sudden, but their causes are not. H.I.V./AIDS is another worthy candidate; it claims more than a million lives each year, and nearly forty million people are currently infected.

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Related:
With Summer Coming, Can the Zika Virus Be Contained?
War of the Worms
A Shot Against Malaria