George Packer's Blog, page 217

Dilma Rousseff and the Chronic Dysfunction of Brazil’s Politics

Early last Thursday morning, after Brazil’s senators voted to begin an impeachment trial against President Dilma Rousseff, fireworks crackled in cities around the country. Rousseff was out at last. During her five and a half years in office, she had presided over the country’s deepest recession since the nineteen-thirties, and had been caught in the middle of a giant corruption scandal. Thursday’s vote forced her to step down for the duration of the impeachment trial, and no one expects her to return to power. But by the standards of the recent mass protests against Rousseff, Thursday’s celebrations were muted. In Brasília, the capital, a news photographer’s lens captured a plume of smoke from fireworks rising above the vast lawn of the Esplanade of Ministries, near the National Congress building, where a small group of demonstrators had gathered. Most Brazilians had wanted to see Rousseff go—but now they had to worry about what comes next.

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Related:
A Stronger Link Between Zika and Birth Defects
The Collapse of Dilma Rousseff, the Richard Nixon of Brazil
Movie of the Week: “Antonio das Mortes”

Elizabeth Warren Goes to War Against Donald Trump

When Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, took up the fight against Donald Trump in the last few weeks, it felt a little like that moment in an action movie when the disaffected friend who’d walked out turns up late in the third act, mid-fray, with fresh ammunition and a wink and a grin for her old gang. With Hillary still pinned down in the primaries, unable to shake off the dogged Bernie Sanders campaign, Warren started a Twitter war with Donald Trump.

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Related:
Just How Rich Is Donald Trump?
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, May 17th
The Week in Business: Silicon Valley vs. Regulation, Fed Politics, and More

Why Apple Music Is So Bad When the iPhone Is So Good

On April 28, 2003, Apple launched the iTunes Music Store, saving the music industry from the scourge of piracy while creating a large and steady source of revenue for Apple. Thirteen years later, however, what started as a simple and intuitive way to find music has become a cluttered festoonery of features. As Apple begins competing with focussed streaming services like Spotify, the company’s strategy of tacking new services, like Apple Music, which became available last year, onto already bloated software has made the experience of using the application more and more unpleasant. “It’s yet another major feature added to iTunes on Mac and Windows—an app that everyone seems to agree already has too many features and responsibilities,” John Gruber, a prominent Apple observer, wrote. Just last week, Apple acknowledged users’ complaints about a bug that was deleting music files on personal computers, and promised a quick software update. Many Apple Music customers took to the Internet to warn their fellow-users to back their stuff up. So when Apple said that it would release a new streamlined version of Apple Music at its developers’ conference next month, it seemed as though the company was finally reckoning with the confusion in its music services.

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Related:
Introducing The New Yorker TechFest: October 7, 2016
The Search for Our Missing Colors
Car2Go and the Egotism of the Sharing Economy

The Sorry Legacy of the For-Profit College Boom

Last year, I met fifteen former students and graduates of Corinthian Colleges who had taken a remarkable action to protest the collection of their student debt. Corinthian, a for-profit institution that was, at the time, facing a financial meltdown and several lawsuits over alleged fraud in its recruitment process, had recently started shutting down or selling off its campuses. The students, calling themselves the Corinthian Fifteen, had organized a “debt strike,” refusing to repay their student loans even at the risk of going into default. Their argument was that the Department of Education shouldn’t collect on loans that students were misled into incurring, especially since they earned a degree that was all but worthless or, in some cases, found that their college had shut down before they could graduate.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Real Student-Debt Crisis
The Work-College Revival
A Student-Debt Revolt Begins

Comment from the May 23, 2016, Issue

In “Liberal-in-Chief,” Adam Gopnik writes about Barack Obama’s increasing liberalism as his Presidential term draws to a close.

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Related:
Comment from the May 16, 2016, Issue
Comment from the May 9, 2016, Issue
Comment from the May 2, 2016, Issue

What’s Wrong with the Redskins

In this country we don’t ban “Mein Kampf,” Ku Klux Klan screeds, or objectionable terms for racial groups. It is clear that the government cannot disallow offensive or hateful speech. But the federal trademark law, known as the Lanham Act, has since 1946 barred the registration of marks that may disparage “persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.” In 2014, after nearly half a century of registering and renewing “The Redskins,” the government cancelled the football team’s trademark registrations, on the grounds that the name may be disparaging to Native Americans. The cancellation does not ban the team’s use of the name. Instead, it does away with the legal presumption that the team has the exclusive right to use the name in commerce, thus providing a substantial incentive for the Redskins—and other groups—to avoid using a name that may be considered offensive.

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Related:
The Chicago Police, Race, and the Legacy of Bettie Jones
Racial Discrimination and Capital Punishment: The Indefensible Death Sentence of Duane Buck
Me Gusta Trump: Portrait of a Hispanic Trump Voter

Molotov Coattails

“Every grandson carries a portrait of his grandfather on Victory Day,” Vyacheslav Nikonov, a Russian politician, has said. That is hyperbole—some people don’t go anywhere at all on Victory Day and don’t carry anything, and many people, especially in Russia, don’t even have any pictures of their grandparents. But that’s not the point. Many Russians do carry poster-sized photographs of their grandparents during Victory Day parades in different cities, and Nikonov did so earlier this month, on the seventy-first anniversary of victory in what Russia calls the Great Patriotic War. The thing is, Nikonov’s grandfather’s name was Vyacheslav Molotov.

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Related:
Why Moscow Has Suddenly Been Filled with Tacky, Terrible Art
Vladimir Nabokov, Butterfly Illustrator
Nadiya Savchenko Gives Russia the Finger

The Politics of Bathrooms

On Monday, Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney General, and Pat McCrory, the governor of North Carolina, announced that they would be suing each another over the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, a new law requiring that North Carolinians use only the public bathrooms that correspond to the “biological sex” listed on their birth certificates. In Texas, a parallel conflict began brewing between the retailer Target, which has announced an open-bathroom policy for transgender employees, and the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton. (Paxton has demanded, in a letter to Target’s C.E.O., that the company provide the full text of its “safety policies regarding the protection of women and children from those who would use the cover of Target’s restroom policy for nefarious purposes.”) And inn Chicago, a legal battle is being waged over which high-school locker room a transgender student ought to use. Yesterday, the Obama Administration issued a directive telling all public schools to allow students to use bathrooms or locker rooms matching their gender identities. Across the country, in other words, controversy is following transgender people who step into sex-segregated spaces.

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Related:
Transgender Rights and the End of the New South
Curt Schilling, Internet Embarrassment
North Carolina and the Gay-Rights Backlash

The Week in Business: Silicon Valley vs. Regulation, Fed Politics, and More

Lending Club saw its stock price demolished this week, after its C.E.O. resigned amid revelations that it had been forced to buy back twenty-two million dollars in loans from an investor. The company—which serves as a middleman between borrowers and lenders—repurchased the loans because they had failed to “conform to the investor’s express instructions.” Compounding the furor, the company backdated loan applications to make them look as though they conformed to those instructions. Twenty-two million dollars isn’t that much money, given that Lending Club facilitated $2.6 billion in loans in its most recent quarter, but the buyback played into investors’ broader concerns about the industry, and in particular about whether online lenders have set up rigorous-enough oversight mechanisms.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Everyone Knows About the G.O.P. Crackup—Everyone Except the Voters
The Maoism of Donald Trump
Donald Trump and the “John Miller” Tape: A Question of Character

The Kings of Seventeenth Place

Three years ago, when my grade-school-age sons began playing soccer seriously—by which I mean when I began coaching their Sunday-league team, and took it too seriously—they told me that they wanted to call our team Sunderland, after the reliably abysmal Premier League team. I asked why. “Because they’re the best of the worst, dad!” one said.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Leicester City’s Impossible, Anomalous Championship
The Legacy of a Soccer Tragedy
The Downfall of a Russian Soccer Team