George Packer's Blog, page 208

Ali on the Aisle

An unexpected memory of Muhammad Ali arrived for me soon after the sad news of his passing—Ali at a ballgame, of all things. This was early on a spring-training afternoon some twenty years ago in Arizona, when we in the press box at the Athletics’ home park in Phoenix were told that the great man would be in attendance that afternoon.

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Related:
Boxing After Ali
Daily Cartoon: Monday, June 6th
The Outsized Life of Muhammad Ali

Ahead of the New Jersey Vote, Cory Booker Gets Out the Selfies

On Sunday afternoon, Senator Cory Booker stepped into the offices of the Middlesex County Democrats, in Metuchen, New Jersey, for an hour of handshakes, Snapchats, and selfies. The offices, a couple of drab rooms in a suburban business park, were occupied by several dozen volunteers working for the Hillary Clinton campaign. The volunteers had been there since morning, making phone calls to voters identified as likely Clinton supporters, urging those who didn’t hang up to go out on Tuesday and vote for Clinton over Bernie Sanders in the state’s primary.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Bernie Sanders Raises the Stakes for the California Primary
Clinton Finds an Effective Attack Against Trump
There Is No Justice In Killing Dylann Roof

LeBron James Versus the New Basketball Gods

Some prominent N.B.A. retirees love the idea that Stephen Curry is coddled by refs and would never have gotten away with his jump-shooting style back in the day. This is sheer nonsense. On a play-by-play basis, defenses conspire to make Curry’s game, with or without the ball, a living hell. In Game One of the N.B.A. Finals, while trying to curl his way around LeBron James, Curry (without the ball) let the side of his face ride on James’s elbow, which James graciously refused to lower. For that moment, the game, or the game-within-the-game, was James’s funny bone rubbing itself as nastily as possible along Curry’s jawline, as Curry pushed back, his neck straining to keep his head upright, his hips laboring to swivel him into the clear. No whistle, let ’em play.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Outsized Life of Muhammad Ali
Force and Flow in the N.B.A. Finals
Steph Curry and the Warriors’ Astonishing Season

Harmony and Martyrdom Among China’s Hui Muslims

The Martyr’s Memorial in Shadian, China, is a gray pillar topped with a crescent moon, set on a stone block engraved with names. It commemorates the so-called Shadian incident, a massacre that took place in July of 1975, when the People’s Liberation Army came to this small southwestern town to quell what the central authorities were calling an Islamist revolt. Then, as now, Shadian was inhabited almost entirely by Hui, members of one of the country’s two main Muslim minority groups. In the years leading up to the incident, the Red Guards had attacked the Hui, destroying their mosques and forcing them to wear pigs’ heads around their necks. When the P.L.A. soldiers arrived, they razed more than four thousand houses and killed some sixteen hundred villagers in one week. The Chinese government later apologized for the raid, blaming it on the Gang of Four—the ousted architects of the Cultural Revolution—and helping fund Shadian’s reconstruction. But locals do not pay homage to the state at the memorial. The pillar is emblazoned with the Fatiha, the first chapter of the Koran, in green Arabic calligraphy, and, above it, in Chinese characters, the word she-xi-de. “That’s the Arabic word shahid, instead of lieshi, the Chinese word for ‘martyr,’ “ a man named Huang told me. (As with the other Chinese Muslims I spoke with, I will protect his identity by referring to him only by his surname.) “You know why? Lieshi would include the P.L.A. soldiers, wouldn’t it?”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Tiananmen Mystery: Can China Hold an Open Terror Trial?
Xinjiang and Nationalism

Boxing After Ali

The death of Muhammad Ali proved that an event need not be surprising in order to be shocking. Sombre statements arrived from all sorts of people who loved him, and it wasn’t just his friends who seemed to feel, somehow, that he loved them, too. One of the most widely quoted tributes came from President Barack Obama, whose remarks combined praise (Ali was “a man who fought for what was right”) with gentle criticism (he “could be careless with his words”), and arrived at a fittingly grand conclusion: “Muhammad Ali shook up the world.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Ali on the Aisle
Daily Cartoon: Monday, June 6th
The Outsized Life of Muhammad Ali

The French Open, Novak Djokovic, and the End of the Machine Age in Tennis

For a moment on Sunday, after his four-set victory over Andy Murray, Novak Djokovic looked as if he might fall—not collapse in a rush of relief and joy but stumble. That, in itself, was astonishing. For three hours, Djokovic had stretched, slid, and spun into shots and out of them, never losing balance. His body had seemed constructed of sinew and veins and long, strong ligaments. But, when it was over, when he knew he had won his first French Open title, he seemed suddenly frail and thin, catching his breath, staggered by a staggering thing.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Next Great Men’s Tennis Player?
Andy Murray Versus the French
Why Tolstoy Took Up Tennis

Bernie Sanders Raises the Stakes for the California Primary

The Democratic primary season comes to a climax on Tuesday, when six states will vote: California, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, and South Dakota. The biggest prize is California, where the race appears to be tightening. On Thursday, the widely respected Field Poll showed Hillary Clinton leading Bernie Sanders among likely voters by just two points, forty-five per cent to forty-three.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Clinton Finds an Effective Attack Against Trump
There Is No Justice In Killing Dylann Roof
Donald Trump’s Big Clinton-E-mail Conspiracy Theory

Clinton Finds an Effective Attack Against Trump

A certain hype preceded Hillary Clinton’s speech on foreign policy on Thursday, and a careful attention to detail. Clinton spoke in San Diego, a military town, just after Memorial Day, with what appeared to be eighteen American flags behind her. The new weapon she brought was the insight that Donald Trump’s anti-élite grievances contain a constant denigration of America, and of the vast, collaborative project of making it better. “He called our military a ‘disaster,’ “ Clinton said. “He said we are, and I quote, a ‘third-world country.’ “

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
There Is No Justice In Killing Dylann Roof
Bill Weld’s Libertarian Conversion
Donald Trump’s Big Clinton-E-mail Conspiracy Theory

There Is No Justice In Killing Dylann Roof

A few months ago, I learned that the state of Texas publishes the last words of the men and women it executes. At first, reading through each statement made me feel uneasy, as if I were eavesdropping on a conversation through a door that was mistakenly left cracked open. But after reading through several dozen of the testimonies, amid the disquiet, I began to feel as if I were bearing witness to a small moment of human redemption. To read through each statement is to be introduced to something we would otherwise neglect. It is a small reclamation of humanity for those whom we have deemed to be no longer worthy of it. I was particularly struck by the words of a man, named Reginald, before he was strapped to a table to receive lethal injection: “They are fixing to pump my veins with a lethal drug the American Veterinary Association won’t even allow to be used on dogs. I say I am worse off than a dog.” This, in its rawest form, is capital punishment. The death penalty not only takes away the life of the person strapped to the table—it takes away a little bit of the humanity in each of us.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Clinton Finds an Effective Attack Against Trump
Donald Trump’s Big Clinton-E-mail Conspiracy Theory
A Very Clinton E-Mail Scandal

Bill Weld’s Libertarian Conversion

Last weekend, when Bob Durand, a longtime environmental lobbyist, arrived at an old buddy’s private camping grounds in the Adirondacks, his host was absent. William Weld, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, had invited Durand and several other friends to come out for a few days of fishing. But as Durand and the other guests were casting their lines into the lake on the property, Weld was in Orlando, Florida, becoming the Vice-Presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Clinton Finds an Effective Attack Against Trump
Donald Trump’s Big Clinton-E-mail Conspiracy Theory
Trump University: It’s Worse Than You Think