George Packer's Blog, page 219

Donald Trump vs. Family Values

In 2012, the midway point of the Obama era, the conservative thinker Charles Murray published a long lament of the experience of white America, titled “Coming Apart.” Murray, two decades earlier, had co-written the notorious book “The Bell Curve,” and had become the emblem of the noxious theory that race and intelligence were linked; the memory of that episode dominated the reaction to his new book. But there was something new in “Coming Apart,” having to do with Murray’s horror of discovery. His argument was that if you cleave the great mass of white Americans in two, based on the wealth of the places they live, you find radical differences in experience. The wealthy white places, which Murray collectively called “Belmont,” are full of coherent neighborhoods, families, and lives. The poor white places, which he named “Fishtown,” were all loose ends. Divorce and single-parent households were endemic, and so were high-school dropouts. In Belmont, the disruptions to the family were a phenomenon of the seventies, quickly corrected; in Fishtown they kept escalating. The same conditions that conservatives had insisted were marks of moral decay in black neighborhoods turned out to be persisting in white ones. To Murray, the residents of Belmont, whom he saw as mostly liberal, seemed beset by an “ecumenical niceness,” a failure to denounce the moral collapse on the other side of the tracks, to acknowledge that something had gone terribly wrong.

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America in a Time of Campaign Violence
Paul Ryan’s Quest to Really, Truly Unify with Donald Trump
Going There with Donald Trump

The Mission of a Black Baseball Team

It’s a Wednesday afternoon in April, and Bill Evans Field is dotted with players taking batting practice, fielding grounders, shagging flies. The Clark Atlanta Panthers practice on a lot at the corner of Princeton Drive and College Street in College Park, Georgia, behind the library, across from the police station, a twenty-five-minute drive from their campus just west of downtown Atlanta. Clark College, founded in 1869, was the first four-year liberal-arts institution in the country dedicated to serving African-American students; Atlanta University, founded four years earlier, was the oldest predominantly black graduate school. They merged in 1988. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that the Panthers are almost exclusively black. But, these days, even among the baseball teams of historically black colleges and universities, or H.B.C.U.s, this makes the Panthers a rather remarkable exception.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Leicester City’s Impossible, Anomalous Championship
No Refereeing Is Bad Refereeing

How Air Jordan Became Crying Jordan

In 1991, Gatorade released its first commercial starring Michael Jordan. In the minute-long ad, shots of Jordan on the basketball court are spliced with those of kids imitating his signature moves, while a new earworm of a song, written specifically for the commercial, plays in the background. “If I could be like Mike,” a chorus of children’s voices sings, serving as a proxy for people of all ages everywhere. Jordan had already been appearing in national ads for years, but this was his coronation.

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Golden State and the Mathematical Magic of Seventy-Three
When Yao Ming Was the Center of the World
Enjoying March Without the Madness

Why Do We Care If Facebook Is Biased?

The “trending” section of Facebook—the space on the top right-hand side of the page where you can read about what’s happening in the world—functions sort of like the front page of a newspaper. But if you compare it to the cover of an actual national newspaper you won’t see much overlap. On Tuesday morning, the top articles on the front page of the print edition of the Times were about Donald Trump’s uncomfortable attempts to court the Republican establishment and about the legal battle over a North Carolina law regulating which bathrooms transgender people can use. When I opened Facebook that afternoon, the top trending topics included the news that Eva Mendes and Ryan Gosling had, according to TMZ, given birth to a child (Amada) and that the “Guinness Book of World Records” had anointed the oldest living cat (thirty years old, Siamese).

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Going There with Donald Trump

“How the hell do I know what I find incredible?” a bemused philosopher asks in Tom Stoppard’s play “Jumpers.” “Credibility is an expanding field … and sheer disbelief hardly registers on the face before the head is nodding with all the wisdom of instant hindsight.” This is a now familiar emotion, a recognizable expansion. The unimaginable happens—Donald Trump, fool, oaf, and sociopathic liar, becomes the nominee of a major American political party—and within minutes what ought to be a shock beyond understanding becomes an event to savor, accept, and analyze. The desperate efforts to normalize the aberrant begin: he’s actually a Rockefeller Republican with orange hair; he wasn’t humiliated by President Obama’s mockery at that dinner in 2011 but responded as a lovable, gregarious good guy; even his birtherism wasn’t the vile racist sewage anyone could see it to be—he was genuinely unsure about where exactly it was the President was born. Trump tells one wild ranting lie after another on Sunday-morning television—we are the most heavily taxed nation in the world; he always opposed the Iraq war—and Chuck Todd can’t do much more than nod and say “Gotcha!”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Sanders, Clinton, and the Not-So-Simple Case of West Virginia

When Bernie Sanders took the stage in Salem, Oregon, on Tuesday night, after winning the West Virginia primary—“a big, big victory” and “a tremendous victory,” he called it—he had a look on his face of pure delight. The crowd of a few thousand cheered almost every one of his lines; he threw back his head with a broad grin, and declared the town “ready for a political revolution.” To put it more precisely, they, and Sanders, did not sound ready for this campaign to stop. Hillary Clinton has won more pledged delegates than he has and, with the superdelegates who have promised to support her, she is closer than ever to securing the Democratic Presidential nomination. (West Virginia gives out delegates proportionally, so she got some, too.) It would take not only a Sanders surge but a Clinton crash for that to change. Perhaps that’s what Sanders is waiting for. One of the puzzles of the Democratic primary race, which the West Virginia results did little to untangle, is whether voters are more driven by what and whom they are for or by what they are against—and what they simply can’t abide.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Going There with Donald Trump
The Disruptor’s Guide to Succeeding in Trump’s Post-Apocalyptic Greater America
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Nebraska and West Virginia Confirm It: Ted Cruz Is Done

Sad news out of Nebraska and West Virginia for horror-movie fans: Count Ted Cruz, the dark lord of Texas, won’t be returning from the dead, after all. Rumors to the contrary, which sped across the Internet on Tuesday, turned out, when the G.O.P. primary results came in later that night, to have been idle talk. From now on, viewers of the Republican nomination process will have to make do with just one scary creature in a featured role: the Frankenstein monster that is Donald Trump.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Going There with Donald Trump
The Disruptor’s Guide to Succeeding in Trump’s Post-Apocalyptic Greater America
Sanders, Clinton, and the Not-So-Simple Case of West Virginia

The Western Press Revolts in North Korea

The late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il professed such “boundless love” for his country’s reporters that the state press published a book in 1983 that called him, in its title, “The Great Teacher of Journalists.” Kim took care that journalists had hot breakfasts before they started work, and umbrellas to keep them dry when they went out reporting in the rain, the book explained, and in return they “must become propagandists who spread far and wide the voice of our party.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Transgender Rights and the End of the New South

On Monday, two North Carolinians squared off over the state’s controversial House Bill 2, which requires transgender people to use the bathroom matching their “biological sex” in public schools and government buildings and invalidates local laws protecting transgender people from discrimination. Both Pat McCrory, the governor of North Carolina, and Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney General, grew up partly in Greensboro, a site of anti-segregation sit-ins in 1960, and Lynch recalled that history by comparing H.B. 2 to Jim Crow laws. “Let us reflect on the obvious but often neglected lesson that state-sanctioned discrimination never looks good in hindsight,” she said, as she announced that the Department of Justice is suing North Carolina, claiming that H.B. 2 violates federal laws forbidding sex discrimination.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Ghost of Jack Kemp

When the House Speaker, Paul D. Ryan, the other day postponed, or rethought, any future endorsement of Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, he did it in the name of his party, an entity that Ryan, among others, seems to view as a fragile thing, to be regarded with brotherly affection, the very opposite of Trump’s view of the party as a sort of speed bump. The Republican Party, Ryan told CNN’s Jake Tapper, is “very special to a lot of us,” and he went on to identify it, and himself, as the home “of Lincoln, of Reagan, of Jack Kemp.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Comment from the May 9, 2016, Issue
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