George Packer's Blog, page 207

Bernie Sanders’s Post-California Choice

“You all know it is more than Bernie,” Senator Bernie Sanders said late on Tuesday night, in Santa Monica, to thousands of supporters who were shouting his name. It would be unfair to suggest that they didn’t know that: for one thing, they cheered even louder when Sanders thanked them for taking part in a “political revolution.” And nobody could really know, at that point, if Sanders had lost California, the state that had seemed essential to the idea that the race against Hillary Clinton would undergo a late-life alchemical transformation. (Clinton won by a significant margin, but those votes were counted hours later.) Still, it was common knowledge, in this crowd and across the country, that Clinton, after winning the New Jersey primary earlier in the evening, had declared victory in the race for the Democratic nomination, a day after the Associated Press did it for her. As Sanders’s speech began, the people in the crowd didn’t know if he would agree with her, and with the inescapable delegate math. Many of them clearly hoped that he wouldn’t. And he didn’t. Sanders wasn’t ready to say that the campaign against Donald Trump, at least, was now more about Hillary Clinton than about him.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why Trump’s Canned Speech Won’t Help Him
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, June 8th
Hillary Clinton Makes History

Hillary Clinton Makes History

Eight years to the day after she delivered a poignant concession speech to Barack Obama, in which she talked of having made “eighteen million cracks” in the glass ceiling, Hillary Clinton walked onto a stage at the Brooklyn Navy Yard last night under very different circumstances. Like most modern campaign events, this one had been carefully choreographed. The Duggal Greenhouse, an upscale event space, had been converted into an elaborate television set, with huge American flags for the cameras to dwell on and much smaller flags for people in the crowd to hold.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why Trump’s Canned Speech Won’t Help Him
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, June 8th
Bernie Sanders’s Post-California Choice

Donald Trump and the Legacy of Long John Nebel

Many years ago, a New York broadcaster known as Long John Nebel would go on the air at midnight and stay on until dawn, reaching an audience of insomniacs and others able to pick up the signal of a faraway AM station—WOR, WNBC, WMCA. Nebel’s guests, often with odd biographies, included a man who said that when he left our planet he’d met “an exquisite miniature woman” who was five inches tall. Another visitor told Nebel that, as he was washing dishes in his London flat, a voice said, “Prepare yourself—you are about to become the voice of Interplanetary Parliament!” The program, which went on the air in the nineteen-fifties and ran for more than twenty years, became the place to learn about the “psychic doctor” Edgar Cayce, the emerging influence of L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, and “regressive hypnosis,” which claimed to reveal the secrets of past lives, such as that of a young American housewife who spoke with the brogue of a long-dead Irish girl named Bridey Murphy. It was perhaps best known for the time that it devoted to U.F.O.s and to people who claimed to have met, and sometimes travelled with, beings in flying saucers, along with the supposed coverup of their existence. Nebel, who didn’t believe any of this, eventually wrote about it in a sort-of-memoir called “Way Out World” (1962), but he was a showman who’d once worked as a carnival pitchman. His audience was surprisingly sophisticated, and, for all the time that he devoted to celestial voyagers, an underlying theme was the irrationality, and susceptibility to conspiracy theory, that has always been part of American life.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
BuzzFeed’s Lonely Anti-Trump Stand
Donald Trump Means What He Says
The Media Called the Democratic Race a Day Early

BuzzFeed’s Lonely Anti-Trump Stand

On Monday morning, employees of BuzzFeed received an e-mail from the company’s C.E.O., Jonah Peretti, informing them of an unusual business decision: BuzzFeed had told the Republican National Committee that it would not accept ads for the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, Donald Trump. This wasn’t a meaningless stunt. In April, the Committee had signed a deal to run Republican political ads on BuzzFeed prior to the general election—an agreement worth more than a million dollars, a source told Politico. “We certainly don’t like to turn away revenue that funds all the important work we do across the company,” Peretti wrote in his e-mail, which BuzzFeed later published. “However, in some cases we must make business exceptions: we don’t run cigarette ads because they are hazardous to our health, and we won’t accept Trump ads for the exact same reason.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump and the Legacy of Long John Nebel
Donald Trump Means What He Says
The Media Called the Democratic Race a Day Early

Donald Trump Means What He Says

We’re accustomed to political crises that move from the outside in. We know that the coverup is often worse than the crime; we envision concentric circles of influence around a politician and speculate about how close a crisis will creep. What makes Donald Trump’s attack on the federal judge Gonzalo Curiel so singular is that it has only one actor, Trump himself. It was Trump who, on Thursday, declared that the judge’s Mexican heritage should disqualify him from presiding over a federal fraud lawsuit concerning Trump University. (Curiel was born in Indiana, six decades ago, to Mexican parents who later became American citizens.) It was Trump who, pressed on the Sunday shows about whether he was really saying that Curiel’s ethnic heritage meant that he could not do his job (“Is that not the definition of racism?” Jake Tapper asked, on CNN), insisted that was precisely what he meant, and who told John Dickerson, of CBS, that a Muslim judge could not be impartial, either. On a private conference call on Monday, it was Trump who lashed out at his surrogates, according to Bloomberg, insisting that they defend his racism. There is none of the usual euphemism or misdirection. There are no ancillary characters. The inquiry runs only to Trump.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump and the Legacy of Long John Nebel
BuzzFeed’s Lonely Anti-Trump Stand
The Media Called the Democratic Race a Day Early

The Day Muhammad Ali Punched Me

On June 4, 1991, at approximately 3:45 P.M., Muhammad Ali punched me in the face—not in the ring but on a Trailways bus cruising along Interstate 78—and I deserved it. I had boarded the bus earlier that day, in Manhattan, along with some fifteen journalists and photographers, plus members of Ali’s entourage. We were headed toward Ali’s old training camp in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania, about twenty-five miles from Reading. The sportswriters Dick Schaap, Sal Marchiano, Robert Lipsyte, and Ralph Wiley were along for the ride, as was the former heavyweight contender Earnie Shavers. I was there because I had reviewed Tom Hauser’s oral biography of Ali, “Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times,” which had just been published and was the occasion for the press junket.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Ali on the Aisle
Boxing After Ali
Daily Cartoon: Monday, June 6th

The Media Called the Democratic Race a Day Early

Ever since late April, when Hillary Clinton won the New York Democratic primary and followed up by carrying four of the five states in the so-called Acela primary, it has been clear that she would almost certainly be her party’s candidate in November.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump and the Legacy of Long John Nebel
Sanders Vows to Keep Fighting for Nomination Even if Hillary is Elected President
BuzzFeed’s Lonely Anti-Trump Stand

Obama’s Role on Clinton’s Team

In 2008, during a debate before the New Hampshire primary, Barack Obama dismissed Hillary Clinton as “likable enough.” It is a small irony, perhaps, but not an insignificant one, that he is now making the case that he likes her a lot. Over the past several months, in public and private appearances, Obama has been touting her credentials (“she would make an excellent President”), vouching for her personal qualities (“she’s really warm and funny and engaging”), and defending her against critics who says she is overly cautious and artificial (authenticity, he told a group of Democratic donors in March, is overrated in politics). At times, he has made a stronger case for Clinton’s candidacy than she has herself. Obama today might be the best friend—and the most important one—Clinton has in the political arena.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Sanders Vows to Keep Fighting for Nomination Even if Hillary is Elected President
The Media Called the Democratic Race a Day Early
Ahead of the New Jersey Vote, Cory Booker Gets Out the Selfies

Republicans Express Shock at Trump, But Stand by Him

“The comment about the judge the other day just was out of left field, from my mind,” Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, said Friday, on a Milwaukee radio show. He was referring to Donald Trump’s claim that Judge Gonzalo Curiel was not fit to preside over the Trump University fraud case because of his “Mexican heritage.” Trump has been saying things like that for twenty-five years. Yet, as Ryan would have it, his attack on Curiel comes like a ball thrown wildly, seemingly out of nowhere. Over the weekend, Trump also suggested that he wouldn’t trust Muslim judges. If Ryan didn’t see that one coming, the baseball metaphor he may actually be looking for is that of an infielder standing half asleep in the baselines, daydreaming about his own glory, as a runner comes barrelling at him. He’s about to slide hard.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump and the Legacy of Long John Nebel
BuzzFeed’s Lonely Anti-Trump Stand
Donald Trump Means What He Says

The Ungraspable Value of the World’s Largest Diamond

On a recent Saturday afternoon, visitors wandered through Sotheby’s, on the Upper East Side, to inspect articles featured in this season’s auctions. On the ground floor, they could inquire about a bottle of Château Mouton Rothschild 1945 from the wine cellar of the businessman William Koch. In the exhibition halls upstairs, a Mayan classical-period stucco head was on display, as were a collection of Signacs and two diminutive Francis Bacon self-portraits. And, on the sixth floor, in a small room outside the jewelry section, surrounded by images of the cosmos and encased in glass, a truly unusual object was rotating atop a velvet-covered pedestal: the Lesedi La Rona, the biggest diamond in the world. At eleven hundred and nine carats, the stone was about the size of a fist. Its skin was opaque in places, but certain angles offered brief, clear glimpses into the depths of the crystal: a tightly woven, perfectly symmetrical carbon lattice.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
In the News: Whole Lotta Dough, Wall Street Books
Put a Ring On it