George Packer's Blog, page 220

The Spirit of K-Tel Is Alive on Kickstarter

A few years back, I had lunch with Phil Kives, the legendary founder of the schlock-hawking company K-Tel, who passed away in late April, at age eighty-seven. Kives was in Toronto visiting his daughter Samantha, who runs what remains of his once vast consumer empire (the company now focusses on licensing music), and they were interested in speaking with me about the possibility of working on Kives’s memoir.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Kickstarter’s Choice: How Free Should Speech Be on the Web?
Money Matters
Nixon, As They Saw Him

The Dangers of the Ever More Powerful Presidency

In his book “The Decline and Fall of the American Republic,” Bruce Ackerman writes that the power of the American Presidency today vastly exceeds what the founders had in mind and, as a result, is “a serious threat to our constitutional tradition.” With the office’s current powers, “perhaps we will hear President Rightist insisting that the nation can no longer tolerate tens of millions of illegal immigrants in our midst, and that he has no choice but to detain or deport them ‘with all deliberate speed,’ ” Ackerman writes. “Or perhaps President Leftist will be demonizing the banks, condemning them for creating a great conspiracy and strangling the nation’s hopes for prosperity, and demanding their immediate nationalization in the name of the People.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Inside the Field Hospitals for Soldiers Wounded Fighting ISIS
The Pigeon Boy and Other Forgotten Fugitives from ISIS
On the American Front Line Against ISIS

Is Donald Trump a Flip-Flopper or a Wily Politician?

Emerson famously remarked that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Evidently, Donald Trump took the transcendentalist poet’s words to heart. Whatever else Trump might be guilty of—and the list is a long one—he’s not one to cling to prior statements when circumstances change. Over the years, he has reversed his position on many issues, including abortion, gun control, socialized medicine, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Syrian refugees, and Hillary Clinton. And now, with the Republican nomination virtually wrapped up, he has reversed course on economic policy, adopting a more populist line on taxes and wages.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump Doesn’t Make It Easy for Paul Ryan
Comment from the May 16, 2016, Issue
The Real Never Trump Campaign

We Need to Know Who Satoshi Nakamoto Is

The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the computer programmer who created the virtual currency bitcoin, is one of the most compelling stories in technology. In 2008, Nakamoto launched bitcoin with a white paper; in 2011, he vanished, just as the project was hitting its stride, his frequent forum posts and e-mails tapering off to silence. (In his last known correspondence, he told a bitcoin developer that he had “moved on to other things.”) The search for Nakamoto has a tinge of irony: it’s an old-school mystery born in an age of Internet-enabled access to all world knowledge, which threatens to make the entire concept of mystery obsolete. An endless series of apparent misidentifications by journalists over the years has only increased the intrigue. When an Australian entrepreneur named Craig Wright came forward last week to confirm claims made by Wired and Gizmodo last year that he is Nakamoto, his name trended for hours on Twitter, while his crisply parted hair and his generically handsome face were on the front page of Web sites around the world.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Bizarre Saga of Craig Wright, the Latest “Inventor of Bitcoin”
Inside the Fight Over Bitcoin’s Future
Bidding on Bitcoin

Sailing Tries to Solve Its One-Per-Center Problem

On Saturday afternoon, thousands of fans gathered on Battery Park’s lip, hoisting beers, coffee cups, and children into the air, their eyes fixed to the Hudson River. Some had made plans to be there, others had roamed into the crowd by accident, but most seemed genuinely interested in the six America’s Cup vessels that had assembled as part of a series of races aimed at drumming up interest in next year’s big competition, in Bermuda.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Cover Story: Bruce McCall’s “Regatta on the Hudson”
Sailing Through the Trash and Sewage of Guanabara Bay
Selling J.F.K.’s Boat

Donald Trump Doesn’t Make It Easy for Paul Ryan

“All of a sudden, he wants to be cute,” Donald Trump said at a rally in Eugene, Oregon, on Friday, on the subject of Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House. “But, you know, we’ll see.” The day before, Ryan had said that he was “not there right now” when it came to endorsing Trump for the Presidency. Not long before that, he had said that he would support his party’s nominee, whoever that might be. But by Friday that was presumptively, prohibitively Trump. Ryan, speaking to Jake Tapper on CNN about the “standards” that the standard-bearer would be expected to uphold, seemed to be trying to present himself as their clear-eyed, upright embodiment. Trump, talking about Ryan, sounded like the mob boss in a movie, mocking the young D.A. who, despite having made just a few compromises and looked the other way, thinks that he can draw a line somewhere—that he can say no when it really matters, and even lecture the old guy on morality. But Trump isn’t going to make it easy for Ryan to keep his dignity intact. It may be too late for that, anyway.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Ghost of Jack Kemp
Is Donald Trump a Flip-Flopper or a Wily Politician?
Comment from the May 16, 2016, Issue

Iran’s Grim News from Syria

Iran is taking increasingly heavy casualties in Syria. A statement from the Revolutionary Guards announced on Saturday that thirteen of the corps’ élite forces were “martyred” in the escalating battle near Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, which has become the front line in the five-year civil war. Another twenty-one Iranians were wounded. It is, for Iran, the largest single casualty toll since the country intervened to rescue the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. The fighting took place in Khan Touman, a village nine miles south of Aleppo.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
How the Curse of Sykes-Picot Still Haunts the Middle East
Iran’s Javad Zarif on the Fraying Nuclear Deal, U.S. Relations, and Holocaust Cartoons
A Syrian Family Finds Refuge on a Swedish Island

The Rehabilitation Paradox

Aman is a twenty-three-year-old man with schizophrenia. As a child, he moved to Boston from the Caribbean, settling with his mother in the predominantly African-American section of Dorchester. During his teen-age years, he got into gang fights and was stabbed three different times. In his junior year, he dropped out of high school and lived in homeless shelters. He was arrested twice for drug possession, and, at seventeen, he was caught with a sawed-off shotgun and sentenced to eighteen months, the mandatory minimum.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Virginians with a Felony Conviction Can Now Vote, But Getting a Job Is No Easier
A Whistle-Blower Behind Bars
An Unfinished Prison Story

Comment from the May 16, 2016, Issue

In “Head of the Class,” George Packer writes about the source of Donald Trump’s popularity with the white working class.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Real Never Trump Campaign
When Rhetoric Distorts Statistics
Trump and the End of the Road

The Real Never Trump Campaign

Last week in Palm Beach, Donald Trump’s campaign adviser Paul Manafort gave a presentation to Republican National Committee members on how the candidate would make himself less toxic in a general election, and someone leaked a tape of the proceedings to the Washington Post. In the primaries Trump had been “playing a part,” Manafort assured his audience, and he would play a different one in the general. That got the headlines. But Manafort said something else interesting, too. Trump’s problems, he claimed, were only matters of “personality.” Hillary Clinton’s ran deeper, to “character.” Fixing personality issues “is a lot easier,” according to Manafort. “You can’t change somebody’s character, but you can change the way a person presents himself.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Comment from the May 16, 2016, Issue
When Rhetoric Distorts Statistics
Trump and the End of the Road