George Packer's Blog, page 209

An Assassination That Could Bring War Or Peace

At a press conference in Hanoi on May 23, President Obama announced that he would lift the decades-old arms embargo on Vietnam, which he called “a lingering vestige of the Cold War.” He also confirmed that, two days earlier, a missile launched from a U.S. Special Operations Forces drone had killed the Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansur in a taxi about a hundred miles southwest of Quetta, the capital of the Pakistani province of Balochistan. (The strike also killed the driver, Muhammad Azam, whose family the U.S. should compensate.) Obama called the air strike an “important milestone” in terminating that other vestige of the Cold War: the protean, never-ending conflict in Afghanistan.

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Related:
Iran’s Grim News from Syria
Not Even Kabul Is Safe from the Taliban
The Lives of American Soldiers, Before and After War

The Outsized Life of Muhammad Ali

What a loss to suffer, even if for years you knew it was coming. Muhammad Ali, who died Friday, in Phoenix, at the age of seventy-four, was the most fantastical American figure of his era, a self-invented character of such physical wit, political defiance, global fame, and sheer originality that no novelist you might name would dare conceive him. Born Cassius Clay in Jim Crow-era Louisville, Kentucky, he was a skinny, quick-witted kid, the son of a sign painter and a house cleaner, who learned to box at the age of twelve to avenge the indignity of a stolen bicycle, a sixty-dollar red Schwinn that he could not bear to lose. Eventually, Ali became arguably the most famous person on the planet, known as a supreme athlete, an uncanny blend of power, improvisation, and velocity; a master of rhyming prediction and derision; an exemplar and symbol of racial pride; a fighter, a draft resister, an acolyte, a preacher, a separatist, an integrationist, a comedian, an actor, a dancer, a butterfly, a bee, a figure of immense courage.

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Related:
Force and Flow in the N.B.A. Finals
The Mind-Blowing Athleticism of Simone Biles
Equal Pay for Equal Play: The Case for the Women’s Soccer Team

Zikanomics: Is Congress on the Mosquitoes’ Side?

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

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Related:
A Stronger Link Between Zika and Birth Defects
Life-Expectancy Inequality Grows in America
With Summer Coming, Can the Zika Virus Be Contained?

The Next Great Men’s Tennis Player?

These days, men’s tennis waits and waits—and I am not talking about the countless rain delays at the Drenched Open the past two weeks in Paris. The men’s game waits wistfully for the Golden Age to finally tarnish, and for the oldest two of the Big Four—Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Andy Murray—to call it quits. (Thirty-four-year-old Federer, with an injured back, didn’t play a point at Roland Garros, for the first time since 1999, and thirty-year-old Nadal, with an injured wrist, didn’t make it to the second week, for the first time since his very first appearance there, in 2005.) And it waits, with the leaps of faith and loss of heart common to the passionate, for the next cohort of potentially great champions. Or even one.

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Related:
Andy Murray Versus the French
Tennis’s Lost Generation Gets Its Shot
French Open: Overcoming Djokovic

Donald Trump’s Birtherism and the Trump U. Judge

Last week, a judge hearing the lawsuit against Trump University ordered testimony unsealed that contained damning assessments from former employees of the now defunct enterprise. Trump University was a “fraudulent scheme,” a former sales manager said, that “preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money.” Trump responded with his usual dignity, maturity, and dedication to American ideals of fair play: he suggested that the judge must be against him because he was “Mexican.”

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Related:
The Outsized Life of Muhammad Ali
The Spectacle of the Spectacles
Zikanomics: Is Congress on the Mosquitoes’ Side?

Donald Trump’s Big Clinton-E-mail Conspiracy Theory

Thursday night, at the San Jose Convention Center, Donald Trump offered a very Trumpian theory for why Hillary Clinton, a woman who served for four years as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, might be saying positive things about Obama’s foreign-policy record, and in particular about the nuclear deal with Iran. “She doesn’t want to go to jail! That’s why folks, that’s why,” he told the crowd, suggesting that Obama was holding the threat of imprisonment over her. Indeed, that fear was the reason that she was working so hard to win her party’s primaries. Trump had analyzed her race against Senator Bernie Sanders, and all the signs were there: “The only reason she’s been dragged so far left, believe me, is that she doesn’t want to go to jail over the e-mails”—that is, for undefined crimes related to her use of a private e-mail system while in the State Department. “If I win,” Trump said, then spread his arms, shrugged, and muttered something about statutes of limitations and what he would tell his Attorney General to do. He would, he said, be “fair.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump University: It’s Worse Than You Think
Donald Trump and the Idea of the Rust Belt
The Day of the “Roaring Jackass”

Force and Flow in the N.B.A. Finals

Every game involving the Golden State Warriors begins well before the buzzer, with Steph Curry’s liturgical spectacle of a warm-up routine, watched reverently by the fans, media, and arena staff who comprise the point guard’s congregation at the Coliseum. The scene before Game 1 of the N.B.A. Finals, against the Cleveland Cavaliers, was no exception, and it culminated, as always, after a series of shots of increasing difficulty, with Curry’s signature volleys from the tunnel that leads to the locker room. As sometimes surely happens, he attempted maybe five such shots and never managed to connect. In retrospect, that might’ve been an omen: he never settled into a rhythm.

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Related:
The Outsized Life of Muhammad Ali
Steph Curry and the Warriors’ Astonishing Season
The Mind-Blowing Athleticism of Simone Biles

Remembering Kalief Browder

Kalief Browder, who was arrested at the age of sixteen for stealing a backpack, spent three years awaiting trial on Rikers Island. For almost two of those years, he was held in solitary confinement. After his release, he enrolled at Bronx Community College but struggled with paranoia and delusions. Browder committed suicide on June 6, 2015.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Kalief Browder, in His Own Words
Kalief Browder Learned How to Commit Suicide on Rikers
Announcing the “Doctor Neighbor” Sitcom Reboot!

Kalief Browder, in His Own Words

Kalief Browder was jailed at Rikers Island at the age of sixteen; he spent three years locked up without ever being convicted of a crime, and much of that time was spent in solitary confinement. In 2014, Jennifer Gonnerman wrote about Browder and the failings of the criminal-justice system that his case exposed: unconscionable delays in the courts, excessive use of solitary confinement, teen-agers being charged for crimes as adults, brutality on the part of corrections officers. In 2015, Browder committed suicide. On The New Yorker Radio Hour, Gonnerman shares excerpts from the interviews she recorded with Browder, in which he described the psychological toll of spending years in a twelve-by-seven cell.

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Related:
Remembering Kalief Browder
Kalief Browder Learned How to Commit Suicide on Rikers
Albert Woodfox and the Case Against Solitary Confinement

Trump University: It’s Worse Than You Think

Following the release, earlier this week, of testimony filed in a federal lawsuit against Trump University, the United States is facing a high-stakes social-science experiment. Will one of the world’s leading democracies elect as its President a businessman who founded and operated a for-profit learning annex that some of its own employees regarded as a giant rip-off, and that the highest legal officer in New York State has described as a classic bait-and-switch scheme?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump and the Idea of the Rust Belt
The Day of the “Roaring Jackass”
What Donald Trump Thinks Judges Are Good For