George Packer's Blog, page 216

LeBron James and Steph Curry Remind Us Who They Are

One of the pleasures of the N.B.A. playoffs is watching talented but complicated basketball teams continue to become who they are. The four remaining teams this year—Thunder, Warriors, Raptors, Cavaliers—have trudged or glided through level after level, inching their way toward the video-game boss that is the Finals. In doing so, two of them have undergone—and continue to undergo—a process of distillation: their characters keep clarifying. The other two, for better or worse, keep showing us who they’ve been since November.

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Related:
Golden State and the Mathematical Magic of Seventy-Three
How the Jump Shot Brought Individualism to Basketball
The Golden State Warriors’ Beautiful Game

The Short-Lived Career of an Austin Uber Driver

My neighbor Lisa’s minivan, a pearly blue 2008 Chrysler Town & Country, has a hundred and eighty-four thousand miles on it, reflecting the fact that in a car-centric city like Austin, Texas, to be a parent is also to be a part-time shuttle driver. She’s racked up miles driving the boys to and from school—not to mention Scout meetings, band camp, wrestling tournaments, and her older son’s first date. She also ferries them on summer cross-country road trips lasting many weeks. (Her husband, who works at I.B.M., joins them for shorter segments along the way.) In 2014, she took things a step further by obtaining a commercial driver’s license, so that she could operate a rig full of equipment for the high-school marching band. Then, last year, she went pro: she started driving for Uber and Lyft.

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Related:
Racial Discrimination and Capital Punishment: The Indefensible Death Sentence of Duane Buck
One of the Stranger Jobs in Texas
What We Learned from the Donald Trump-Marco Rubio Screamfest

How Recipe Videos Colonized Your Facebook Feed

In June of last year, Andrew Ilnyckyj, a video producer at BuzzFeed, was filming the preparation of the All Day Breakfast Burger. After piling layers of bacon, a fried egg, and bourbon-infused syrup onto a cheese-covered patty, a hand reached into the frame to add the top half of a tater-tot bun. As the bun landed, a drop of golden yolk slithered onto the plate. “Oh, yes!” Ilnyckyj exclaimed, ecstatic.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Week in Business: Silicon Valley vs. Regulation, Fed Politics, and More
Why Do We Care If Facebook Is Biased?
Facebook Trivia Questions, Customized for You

The Demise of RBC and Investigative Reporting in Russia

Three top editors at RBC, a Russian media organization that includes a business newspaper and the country’s best political Web site, left their jobs last week. Their departures are bound to be followed by major changes to editorial policy at the company, which is owned by the billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, in yet another major blow to press freedom in Russia.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Russia Declares War on Eurovision
Molotov Coattails
Why Moscow Has Suddenly Been Filled with Tacky, Terrible Art

What Can the U.S. Learn from Radicalization in the French-Speaking World?

Late last fall, just a few weeks before the coördinated attacks in Paris, a Brookings Institution researcher named Chris Meserole assembled all the data he could find about which countries ISIS fighters came from, and began to run programs looking for correlations. Much of the scholarship in the evolving field of terror analysis emphasized jihadists’ networks and their psychological profiles, but Meserole and his collaborator, Will McCants, were interested in a separate line of questions. What was the social position of Sunni Muslims in each country that sent jihadis to Syria, and did any aspects of that position seem to correspond with the number they sent? Meserole thought that some new analytics techniques could help cut through the data, and once he applied them he found several correlations. Two were not especially strong or surprising: countries where Sunni Muslims were densely concentrated in cities, and where they had especially high rates of youth unemployment, tended to produce more ISIS fighters. But the third was striking. The most powerful variable by far in predicting how many jihadis a country would produce was whether the people in that country spoke French.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Demise of Hezbollah’s Untraceable Ghost
The French Culture Wars Continue
Mercy for a Terrorist in Norway

Lessons from America’s First Memory World Champion

On the Saturday before Mother’s Day, Alex Mullen, the country’s top-ranked memory athlete, joined his parents and grandmother for dinner at a restaurant near his grandmother’s home, in Easton, Pennsylvania. Earlier that day, Mullen had been in Hershey, Pennsylvania, ninety miles west of Easton, where he had competed in the U.S.A. Memory Championship and set two new national records, in speed cards and speed numbers. To set the speed-numbers record, he had memorized more than five hundred and fifty sequenced digits in five minutes.

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Related:
Why We Remember the Beatles and Forget So Much Else
A Christmas Fit for Gentiles
The Work We Do While We Sleep

Megyn Kelly’s Guide to Surrendering to Donald Trump

“You are so powerful,” Megyn Kelly, of Fox, said to Donald Trump, with a note of wonder in her voice, as she interviewed him for her special on Tuesday night. They were sitting in a conference room on a high floor, with a view of Central Park behind them, the proper backdrop for an interview characterized by a soft deferral to the grandeur of Trump. Kelly had, in the moments before, remembered his angry response, after she asked a question at the first Republican Presidential debate about his past comments disparaging women. It had caused a “firestorm,” and Trump was the fire. Did he understand the profound effect that he had on people?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Just How Rich Is Donald Trump?
Elizabeth Warren Goes to War Against Donald Trump
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, May 17th

A Narrow But Significant Win for Hillary Clinton in Kentucky

When she was last the center of national attention, Alison Lundergan Grimes, a Democrat who is Kentucky’s Secretary of State, was being soundly defeated by Mitch McConnell in a 2014 Senate race that her Party had hoped to win. Shortly after ten o’clock last night, Grimes delivered more heartening news to the Democratic establishment, declaring that Hillary Clinton was the unofficial winner of the Kentucky primary. With about ninety-nine per cent of the votes counted, Clinton was running ahead of Bernie Sanders by just eighteen hundred votes. But Grimes, whose office was overseeing the election, said that she believed the lead would hold up, and the Sanders campaign didn’t contest her claim.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, May 18th
Elizabeth Warren Goes to War Against Donald Trump
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, May 17th

Congress’s Chance to Be Fair to Musicians

It’s common knowledge that the music business has been battered for years. The main culprit is the Internet, which has destroyed the market for albums, and the main victims have been musicians, whose income and options have plummeted. A bipartisan proposal recently introduced in Congress attempts to give musicians a little help by remedying an injustice that is decades older than iTunes.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Russia Declares War on Eurovision
Radiohead Thinks the Internet Is Turning Us All Into Creeps
An Evening with Pokey LaFarge, in Pictures

Just How Rich Is Donald Trump?

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal became the latest publication to look into Donald Trump’s finances and question some of the claims that the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee has made about how rich he is. After examining a financial-disclosure form that Trump filed last year and doing some digging of their own, the paper’s Peter Grant and Brody Mullins estimated that, in 2016, Trump’s businesses will produce about $160 million in pre-tax income. (On Tuesday, Trump filed a new financial-disclosure form that is identical to the one he filed last year.)

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Elizabeth Warren Goes to War Against Donald Trump
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, May 17th
The Week in Business: Silicon Valley vs. Regulation, Fed Politics, and More