George Packer's Blog, page 214

Bernie Sanders’s Political Ancestor, Wayne Lyman Morse

Maybe in a decade or so, we’ll be able to look into history’s rearview mirror and better understand the Republican political traffic—how the contenders started out, changed lanes, passed one another, and fell back, sometimes experiencing serious, or seriocomic, collisions. The off-road campaign of the reality-show star and businessman Donald J. Trump, now the presumptive nominee, may let us see how risky it was to bet the Party’s future on the outcome of a free-for-all that included a provincial Wisconsin governor, a pediatric neurosurgeon, and two unready men from Florida—a Bush and his protégé. In baseball parlance, that was no murderers’ row.

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Related:
The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump
The Year of the Political Troll
Clinton vs. Sanders: Peace Is Still Possible

The Economic Arguments Against Brexit

On Monday, Her Majesty’s Treasury released a report claiming that a “Leave” vote in the June 23rd referendum on whether the United Kingdom should leave the European Union would plunge the British economy, which has been growing modestly for the past couple of years, into a slump. The report says that, in the event of “Brexit,” the unemployment rate would jump, while G.D.P., house prices, the stock market, and the value of the pound sterling would all be hit hard. To emphasize this message, the Treasury posted a big headline on the home page of its Web site: “UK economy would fall into RECESSION if Britain leaves the EU.” In case the message wasn’t clear, the word “RECESSION” was printed in red, with cracks in the letters.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Raghuram Rajan and the Dangers of Helicopter Money
Bernie Sanders and the Realists
A Reprieve from Black Friday Madness?

Inside the Venture-Capital Arm of “Sesame Street”

On a sunny day in April, I visited the offices of the Sesame Workshop, across the street from Lincoln Center. At first, the space looks almost disappointingly normal, until you notice the heap of Snuffleupaguses piled on a desk, the hand-drawn Grovers in a hundred different poses pinned to a wall, and the tidy scraps of construction paper in every shade of yellow, as though waiting to be transformed into a papier-mâché Big Bird. “Sesame Street” isn’t here—the studio is in Astoria—but this is where they tell you how to get there.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Delusional Confidence? A Report from the Marijuana Investor Summit
When “Sesame Street” Meets “The Exorcist”
To Fix California’s Problems, an Investor Suggests Breaking It Up

Do Trump and Clinton Matter?

Here is a rough recent accounting of the relationship between Donald Trump and the Republican Party. The last G.O.P. nominee for President, Mitt Romney, delivered a speech calling Trump “a phony, a fraud,” and warned that his economic policies would lead the country into a “prolonged recession.” The previous nominee, John McCain, called Trump “uninformed and indeed dangerous.” The Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, took the extraordinary step of announcing that he was “not ready” to support Trump, though no other candidate remained in the race. The President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public-policy arm said that Trump has built his life on a “swindle that oppresses the poorest and the most desperate,” and socially conservative radio hosts have amplified that line and made it constant. One of the highest-profile anti-Trump ads, from Hillary Clinton’s campaign, is simply a montage of Republicans attacking him. “A con artist,” Marco Rubio says. “A race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot,” Lindsay Graham says. “A pathological liar,” Ted Cruz says.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Monday, May 23rd
The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump
Daily Cartoon: Friday, May 20th

Comment from the May 30, 2016, Issue

In “Opening Doors,” Jelani Cobb writes about North Carolina’s so-called “bathroom law,” which hearkens back to the days of segregation and de-facto discrimination.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Comment from the May 23, 2016, Issue
The Politics of Bathrooms
Transgender Rights and the End of the New South

The Journey from Syria, Part One

One afternoon last April, a Syrian jeweller named Aboud Shalhoub sat in a messy apartment in Istanbul, wrapping his legs in plastic film. For two and a half years, Shalhoub had tried to build a life in Turkey, away from the perils of wartime Damascus, where his wife, Christine, and their two young children would remain until he could afford to relocate them. As Shalhoub learned Turkish and took on several jobs, his children came to know him mostly through Skype calls. Finally, he decided that his best option was to travel to Europe as a refugee, apply for asylum, and submit paperwork for family reunification. If all went according to plan, his new country could facilitate travel out of Syria for Christine and the children.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Can the U.S. Learn from Radicalization in the French-Speaking World?
A Syrian Family Finds Refuge on a Swedish Island
On Immigration, the Supreme Court Sounds More Like Congress

Google Home: A Device for Our Post-Device Future

Last month, Google C.E.O. Sundar Pichai made a bold statement in a letter to shareholders. After describing the evolution of computers since the nineties, from hulking desktop machines to petite portable devices, he wrote, “Looking to the future, the next big step will be for the very concept of the ‘device’ to fade away.” His point was that, because computing technology is becoming smaller and more powerful, computers can be built in all kinds of forms. Building devices is no longer hard. The difficult part—and the part that will distinguish products from one another—is the experience that computers facilitate.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Google’s Relationship with Payday Loans: It’s Complicated
The Week in Business: Silicon Valley vs. Regulation, Fed Politics, and More
Will the Tesla Model 3 Be the First Truly Self-Driving Car?

The End of the Open Market for Lethal-Injection Drugs

Last week, the global drug company Pfizer announced sweeping new restrictions on the distribution of seven of its products, preventing them from being used to carry out the death penalty. Pfizer came into possession of those products, which include sedatives, paralytics, a pain medication, and a drug used to prevent or treat low levels of potassium in the blood, when it acquired the pharmaceutical company Hospira, in September. Its decision is an enormously significant one for the death penalty in the United States, and ends a long and chaotic chapter in which governments, drug companies, and activists worldwide have gradually closed the open market for the federally approved drugs that have been used for lethal injections.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Pfizer–Allergan Merger Is a Disgrace
Richard Glossip and the End of the Death Penalty
A Strong Argument Against Capital Punishment

The Week in Business: Fed Hawks, Tesla’s Ask, and More

Minutes from the Federal Reserve’s April meeting, which were released this week, showed that the central bank is seriously contemplating hiking the federal-funds rate in June. The news was in keeping with recent public statements by various officials, but it still startled investors. Before the minutes were released, the federal-funds market had been pricing in a five-per-cent chance of a June hike. Afterward, the number jumped to thirty per cent. The yield on ten-year U.S. Treasury bonds also spiked.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Will the New Overtime Rules Really Hurt Workers?
Is Passive Investment Actively Hurting the Economy?
Are We Already in a Bear Market?

Google’s Relationship with Payday Loans: It’s Complicated

“Don’t be evil,” Google’s two founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, famously proclaimed in the manifesto they published just before their company went public, in 2004. Avoiding evil suggested a pretty low bar, but the vow itself—along with the founders’ boast that “our business practices are beyond reproach”—was an invitation to find contrary examples. There have been plenty of nominations, including the announcement, in 2012, that Google would track its customers’ Gmail missives, Web searches, and YouTube usage, which had the effect of  helping advertisers target potential customers. (One headline proclaimed, “Google’s Broken Promise: The End of ‘Don’t Be Evil.’ ”)

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Google Home: A Device for Our Post-Device Future
The Week in Business: Silicon Valley vs. Regulation, Fed Politics, and More
Will the Tesla Model 3 Be the First Truly Self-Driving Car?