George Packer's Blog, page 211

Eric Holder’s Twisted Logic on Edward Snowden

This month marks the third anniversary of Edward Snowden taking up residence in Russia. In this country, he is still a wanted man. “The fact is that Mr. Snowden committed very serious crimes,” the White House spokesman Josh Earnest said last June. “The U.S. government and the Department of Justice believe that he should face them.” That remains the official position, but now, finally, some cracks appear to be emerging.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Don’t Blame Edward Snowden for the Paris Attacks
Hillary Clinton Is Wrong About Edward Snowden
Hillary Clinton Wins Big in Vegas

How Peter Thiel’s Gawker Battle Could Open a War Against the Press

Probably the most important case in American press law is New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964), in which the Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, made it just about impossible for a “public figure” to win a lawsuit against a news organization. Justice William Brennan, in the majority opinion, wrote, “The constitutional guarantees require, we think, a Federal rule that prohibits a public offi­cial from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood re­lating to his official conduct unless he proves that the state­ment was made with ‘actual malice’—that is, with knowl­edge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.” This standard, built on in succeeding cases, made this the country with the most pro-free expression, and specifically pro-press, laws in the developed world; post-Sullivan protections extend from publications to individuals, and from libel to invasion of privacy. “Libel tourism” means looking for a pretext to sue an American publication in England or some other friendlier venue, especially if you’re a celebrity. Conversely, the purveyors of recent monster revelations, like Wikileaks, have taken pains to find American publishing partners, because the right to publish is far more substantial here than elsewhere.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Week in Business: Thiel’s Crusade, a Brief T.S.A. Success, and More
The Stakes in Hulk Hogan’s Gawker Lawsuit
Please Don’t Shut Down the Internet, Donald Trump

Steph Curry and the Warriors’ Astonishing Season

A perfectly executed jump shot is among the most beautiful things in all of sports. Dunks are more ostentatiously athletic, but they end in a staccato thud, a brute pounding of the basket. Like baseball swings, tennis shots, and tackles in football, dunks have the quality of abrupt endings, of momentous and violent collisions between moving objects and determined people. A jump shot, by contrast, is all flow. An athlete takes one or two steps, pauses to gather his body, and then leaps—straight up, if he’s doing things correctly. As he rises, he holds the ball in the palm of one hand while the other gently cradles it from behind. The shooting arm is bent at a ninety-degree angle, its upper half parallel to the floor. The shooting elbow travels upward on a narrow path within inches of the torso, to insure an efficient and steady glide; the other arm folds over, framing the face of the shooter. Then the shooting arm uncoils, exploding into a rigid staff: the ball is launched upward, at an angle, usually, between forty and sixty degrees relative to the shooter’s body. At the top of the player’s leap, before letting the ball go, his shooting hand offers its final adjustments by flicking quickly forward and letting the ball roll backward off the fingertips, insuring that it spins in the opposite direction from which it’s travelling. The backspin works to insure that whatever the ball grazes—the backboard, a piece of the rim—will have minimal effect on its path. When all of this is done just so, the ball drops noiselessly into the woven nylon net, rippling the ropes as little as possible on its way through. By then, a confident shooter will already be on his way down the floor, perhaps with a hand raised in triumph as thousands of people scream and high-five strangers. A perfect shot is swift and noiseless and, when delivered at the right time, can end an opponent’s chances. This is why the man who has lately become its most storied practitioner has been called the Baby-Faced Assassin.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Two of the World’s Greatest Shooters Consider the Four-Point Shot
LeBron James and Steph Curry Remind Us Who They Are
How Air Jordan Became Crying Jordan

Comment from the June 6 & 13, 2016, Issue

In “Bill Problems,” Amy Davidson examines the effect Bill Clinton may be having on Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Transgender Bathroom Debate and the Looming Title IX Crisis
Comment from the May 30, 2016, Issue
Comment from the May 23, 2016, Issue

Why It’s Nearly Impossible for Prisoners to Sue Prisons

On June 21, 2007, two guards at a jail in Baltimore assaulted an inmate named Shaidon Blake, a gang leader who had been convicted of second-degree murder, earlier that year. The guards, James Madigan and Michael Ross, had been ordered to move Blake to solitary after a supervising officer complained that he was starting trouble—“commandeering” the television and using the phone out of turn. According to court documents, Madigan and Ross walked Blake from his cell to a nearby corridor, where they pressed him up against a concrete wall. Ross held Blake, whose hands were cuffed, while Madigan punched him in the face five times.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Whistle-Blower Behind Bars
Prisoners’ Lives Matter
The Case Against Cash Bail

Father Pfleger’s Mission on Chicago’s South Side

Since the nineteen-seventies, Father Michael Pfleger, a white priest at the largest black church on Chicago’s South Side, has been fighting to bring economic justice to his community. At the same time, he is dealing day and night with the victims—and perpetrators—of violence in one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, who wrote about Pfleger in the February 29th issue of the magazine, accompanied him to the funeral of a gang member in the South Side, where Pfleger took the opportunity to preach against retaliation.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Chicago Police, Race, and the Legacy of Bettie Jones
Rahm Emanuel’s Lessons for Hillary Clinton
The Chicago Anti-Trump Protest Was Only the Beginning

Death in a Florida Prison

Harriet Krzykowski, a former prison counsellor, discusses the abuse and torture of mentally ill inmates that took place inside the Florida correctional institution where she worked—and the emotional price she paid for staying silent about it. Eyal Press wrote about Krzykowski in the May 2nd issue of The New Yorker.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Whistle-Blower Behind Bars
Uncovering the Luna Colony, a Lost Remnant of Spanish Florida
Florida’s Shadow Country

The Case Against Assad

At an undisclosed location in Western Europe, a group called the Commission for International Justice and Accountability—CIJA—is gathering evidence of war crimes perpetrated by the Syrian government. It’s unclear when or how Syrian President Bashar al-Assad might ever stand trial, and securing the evidence is extremely dangerous. But CIJA is hoping to build the strongest war-crimes case since Nazi officials were tried at Nuremberg. Ben Taub, who recently wrote about CIJA for The New Yorker, interviewed members of the group and a witness who described being tortured by the Assad regime.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Journey from Syria, Part Six
The Journey from Syria, Part Five
The Journey from Syria, Part Four

The Missing Boater

Dick Conant spent years of his life crisscrossing America by canoe, like a Mark Twain character. On land, he worked a variety of jobs and was often homeless, but paddling on a river, he was king. By chance, on a voyage which began near the Canadian border, on his way to Florida, Conant met Ben McGrath, a New Yorker staff writer, outside McGrath’s home on the Hudson River. McGrath’s piece about Conant appears in the December 14, 2015, issue of The New Yorker; here, he tells the story of a troubled man who found refuge in adventure.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

The Journey from Syria, Part Six

In the previous episode of “The Journey,” Aboud Shalhoub stood at the arrivals area in Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, holding a bouquet of tulips and tapping a pole with anticipation. Then his wife, Christine, and their two children rounded a corner, and the children hugged their father for the first time in three years as Christine looked on, weeping silently and waiting her turn. The odyssey was complete, but the family’s new life in the Netherlands had just begun. “I wish we could have this life in our country,” Christine told the filmmaker, Matthew Cassel. “I’m a refugee. But maybe just for a while.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Journey from Syria, Part Five
The Journey from Syria, Part Four
The Journey from Syria, Part Three