George Packer's Blog, page 210

Kalief Browder Learned How to Commit Suicide on Rikers

On June 6, 2015, Kalief Browder took his own life at his home, in the Bronx. He was twenty-two years old. He had been released from Rikers Island two years earlier, ending an ordeal that had begun on a spring night in 2010, when he had been arrested for robbery, at sixteen. He spent the next three years in jail trying to prove his innocence, and, for about two of those years, he was held in solitary confinement, where he attempted suicide several times. The charges against him were eventually dropped. I met him after his release and wrote a story about him in the fall of 2014.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Death in a Florida Prison
Michelin and the Deaths of Two French Chefs
This Week in Fiction: Mark Haddon on Writing Stories as Complex as the Real World

The Swiss Vote on Guaranteed Income Is About Rich-People’s Problems

On Saturday, voters in Switzerland will go to the polls to vote on whether to give a government-guaranteed minimum income to every citizen. While organizers have tossed around a figure of twenty-five hundred Swiss francs (about the same in dollars) a month for every adult, the referendum is actually less precise. It promises only an unspecified minimum income sufficient to insure a “dignified existence.”

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Daily Cartoon: Thursday, June 2nd
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, June 1st
Why I’m Not Voting

A Way Forward for Brazil

The litany of ironies that has accrued from the May 12th congressional vote that suspended Brazil’s President, Dilma Rousseff—on the grounds that she faked government budget figures and wrongly transferred state money, to win reëlection, in 2014—is growing rapidly. The man who is now the acting President, Michel Temer, moved with alacrity to transmogrify Brazil’s left-of-center government into an unabashedly right-wing one. In doing so, he has made a series of appalling choices.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Dilma Rousseff and Brazil’s Horrible Year
Dilma Rousseff and the Chronic Dysfunction of Brazil’s Politics
A Stronger Link Between Zika and Birth Defects

Donald Trump and the Idea of the Rust Belt

Last week, Donald Trump announced that his general-election campaign will focus on fifteen states, and then he named some of them. (Every Trump disclosure is partial.) Producers at Fox News combined Trump’s own list with leaks and guesswork and assembled a map that colored ten likely targets red. There were a couple of traditional coastal swing states, Virginia and Florida, and there was Trump’s insistence that he will contest California and New York. But what dominated the map was a fist of red over the Great Lakes: Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Pennsylvania. Set aside the hype and whimsy of Trump’s plan to conquer California, and this was the news: Trump will be running a Midwestern campaign.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Day of the “Roaring Jackass”
What Donald Trump Thinks Judges Are Good For
Stephen Hawking Angers Trump Supporters with Baffling Array of Long Words

How Climate Change Will Destroy Our Global Heritage

Last week, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization issued a report called “World Heritage and Tourism in a Changing Climate.” It contains twelve case studies and eighteen snapshots of what climate change is expected to do to places that have been designated as UNESCO World Heritage sites. More than a thousand sites around the world have the UNESCO designation, which is awarded on the basis of “outstanding universal value,” or O.U.V., in U.N. bureaucratese; it’s something between a Michelin star and an Olympic medal, both a marketable touristic imprimatur and a reminder of both the aspirations and the limits of internationalism. And so the report, co-produced with the Union of Concerned Scientists, provides an eclectic set of postcards from our cataclysmic future.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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An Astronaut Finds Himself in Greenland
Fort McMurray and the Fires of Climate Change
Climate Catastrophe, Coming Even Sooner?

Why a Brooklyn Judge Refused to Send a Drug Courier to Prison

Chevelle Nesbeth was nineteen when she was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport, last year, for smuggling about 1.3 pounds of cocaine into the United States. At a boyfriend’s request, she had visited Jamaica, where she was born. Friends there, who had purchased her round-trip airline ticket, asked her to bring two suitcases to someone in the U.S. The drugs were in the handles of the luggage. She said she didn’t know they contained drugs, but there was enough evidence to contradict her story beyond a reasonable doubt. A jury in a Brooklyn federal district court convicted her of felonies for importation and possession of cocaine, with intent to distribute.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Greenpoint: A Severely Abridged History
Bill de Blasio’s Park Slope Primary
The Democratic Debate: A Surprising Exchange on Israel

The Day of the “Roaring Jackass”

Even by the exacting standards of the 2016 campaign, which has turned into a theatre of the absurd and the disturbing, the past twenty-four hours have been bizarre. Barely had Americans returned to work from the Memorial Day weekend when word came that Donald Trump would be holding a mid-morning press conference at Trump Tower. He planned to detail how he had distributed some six million dollars that he claimed to have raised for veterans’ organizations back in January, when, fuming at Fox News and its anchor Megyn Kelly, he skipped a Republican debate in Des Moines, Iowa, and held a charity event of his own.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump and the Idea of the Rust Belt
What Donald Trump Thinks Judges Are Good For
Stephen Hawking Angers Trump Supporters with Baffling Array of Long Words

Los Angeles Tries to Prove that It Doesn’t Necessarily Need the Car

These are iconic images of Los Angeles: the Hollywood sign, bumper-to-bumper traffic, red carpets rich with sequin-spangled starlets. One image that, until recently, came to almost no one’s mind was a railway. But the city is now trying to slough off the stereotype of being only for people who can tolerate spending most of their waking hours in a car, or who rage extravagantly against that fate. Late last month, the L.A. Metro opened an extension of the sky-blue Expo line (named after Exposition Boulevard, which it runs alongside), which now carries passengers from downtown to Santa Monica and the Pacific. The line is meant to serve more than sand-pail carriers. It links two of the city’s busiest business districts, downtown and the tech-startup-heavy community known as Silicon Beach, and makes stops in other spots populated with potential commuters, like the University of Southern California and restaurant strips in Culver City and the Palms.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Your New York vs. Non-New York Real-Estate Options
The Appeal of the Coachella Way of Life
The People v. O. J. Simpson Will Be with Us Forever

When Products Talk

Last month, the Washington Post reported on a surprising new job in Silicon Valley: bot-writer. “Increasingly, there are poets, comedians, fiction writers, and other artistic types charged with engineering the personalities for a fast-growing crop of artificial intelligence tools,” the Post’s Elizabeth Dwoskin wrote. Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Alexa all have personalities in need of shaping. (So, presumably, does Google Home, the competitor to the Amazon Echo announced earlier this month.) These personalities, Dwoskin reported, will soon be joined by more specialized bots developed by other companies, among them Sophie and Molly, “nurse avatars” that talk to patients about their medical conditions. There’s even a “guru avatar” in development, designed to teach meditation.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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How Air Jordan Became Crying Jordan
I’ve Seen the Greatest A.I. Minds of My Generation Destroyed by Twitter
Instagram’s Mark on Public Art

What Donald Trump Thinks Judges Are Good For

In one respect, Donald Trump has been unusually explicit about his judicial preferences. Last month, Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, announced a list of judges whom he might nominate for the Supreme Court, if he’s elected President. All were conservative, all were sitting judges, and many would surely appear on the lists of other prominent Republicans who might lead their Party. Trump did not, however, discuss the merits of any of the individuals on his list, which was reportedly compiled with the help of conservative think tanks. To hear what Trump really thinks about the function of the judiciary, it’s more illuminating to pay attention to what he says in his customary ad-lib style.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Stephen Hawking Angers Trump Supporters with Baffling Array of Long Words
What Game Is Bernie Sanders Playing with Donald Trump?
Does Hillary Clinton Still Believe?