George Packer's Blog, page 221

When Rhetoric Distorts Statistics

On Friday morning, Donald Trump appeared on Fox & Friends to talk about running mates and bad-mouth the economy, which, he said, was “terrible,” proof that the Democrats don’t know what they are doing. “The real unemployment rate is probably twenty per cent. Jobs are leaving. Look at Carrier,” he said, referring to a manufacturer moving jobs from Indiana to Mexico, “look at so many companies. They’re leaving.”

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Related:
Comment from the May 16, 2016, Issue
The Real Never Trump Campaign
Trump and the End of the Road

Trump and the End of the Road

Donald Trump came to California last week. For months, my native state has been called “the end of the road” for the candidates, the place where the nomination would be decided. Lately, that phrase has started to sound different.

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Related:
Comment from the May 16, 2016, Issue
The Real Never Trump Campaign
When Rhetoric Distorts Statistics

The Cost of the Cultural Revolution, Fifty Years Later

In 1979, three years after the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping visited the United States. At a state banquet, he was seated near the actress Shirley MacLaine, who told Deng how impressed she had been on a trip to China some years earlier. She recalled her conversation with a scientist who said that he was grateful to Mao Zedong for removing him from his campus and sending him, as Mao did millions of other intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, to toil on a farm. Deng replied, “He was lying.”

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Related:
What Apple Has to Fear from China
China’s New Age of Economic Anxiety
Why Donald Trump Is Wrong About Manufacturing Jobs and China

The America’s Cup in Manhattan, Once Again

The America’s Cup is, by birth, a New Yorker—sort of. The first New York Yacht Club actually met in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1844, before moving to Staten Island, and then, finally, to Manhattan, where the members gathered in what remains the club’s home, which was built in 1901 and designed by Whitney Warren, one of the architects of Grand Central Terminal. The property, as the Yacht Club’s longtime historian, John Rousmaniere, explained to me on a recent morning, was donated by Commodore J. P. Morgan, whose painted mug, topped off with a sailor’s cap, still graces its hallways. “He didn’t know one end of the boat from the other,” Rousmainiere said, standing near the portrait. “He paid people to get around. But he was a romantic.”

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Leicester City’s Impossible, Anomalous Championship
No Refereeing Is Bad Refereeing
Why Banks Don’t Play It Safe, Even When It Costs Them

The Eleventh Hour for Turkish Democracy

In early 2012, I went to see Ahmet Davutoğlu, who was then Turkey’s Foreign Minister, at the Willard Hotel, in Washington. We met on the second floor, in a private room often reserved for travelling diplomats, which is famously known as “the nest.” Davutoğlu greeted me warmly, directed me to a couch, and offered me tea. And then our interview went disastrously wrong.

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Related:
Erdogan’s March to Dictatorship in Turkey
A Walk in Rome in the Days of Trump
Donald Trump, Con Artist?

Donald Trump, Nate Silver, and the Value of Data Journalism

On Thursday, the Times’ media columnist, Jim Rutenberg, took journalists to task for underestimating Donald Trump’s prospects of winning the Republican nomination. “Wrong, wrong, wrong—to the very end, we got it wrong,” Rutenberg wrote. He singled out data journalists, particularly Nate Silver, of FiveThirtyEight, who for a long time was down on Trump’s prospects. Admonishing the profession to return to J-school basics in the months ahead, Rutenberg concluded that “a good place to start would be to get a good night’s sleep, and then talk to some voters.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Friday, May 6th
A Super-Easy Guide to Voting in a Red State
Is the Alt-Right for Real?

A Missed Opportunity to Support Secular Life in Israel

Four days before Passover, on the slopes of Mount Scopus, a group of Kohanim sacrificed a lamb as mandated by the laws of Exodus. The Kohanim, members of the priestly caste supposedly descended from Moses’s brother Aaron, erected their altar in a national-religious settlement overlooking the golden-domed site that was once home to the Second Temple; they slaughtered, skinned, and roasted the lamb, poured its blood on the altar, and delivered the priestly blessing, accompanied by the sounds of trumpets. Hundreds of spectators, mainly from radical Orthodox movements, were provided bleachers. Arieh King, a member of the group and of the Jerusalem city council, thanked the city for its financial support and said that he looked forward to being able to advertise the ceremony using the municipal logo.

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Related:
The Long, Squabble-Filled, Semi-Arbitrary History of Banning Legumes on Passover
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, April 7th
This Week in Fiction: Kevin Canty on Faith and Desire

Fort McMurray and the Fires of Climate Change

The town of Fort McMurray, some four hundred miles north of Calgary, in Canada, grew up very quickly on both sides of the Athabasca River. During the nineteen-seventies, the population of the town tripled, and since then it has nearly tripled again. All this growth has been fuelled by a single activity: extracting oil from a Florida-sized formation known as the tar sands. When the price of oil was high, there was so much currency coursing through Fort McMurray’s check-cashing joints that the town was dubbed “Fort McMoney.”

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Related:
Climate Catastrophe, Coming Even Sooner?
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, March 15th
Cover Story: Danny Shanahan’s Rising Seas

John Kasich Drifts Away

“Everywhere I went in America, I told people about our beautiful, beloved state,” Governor John Kasich, of Ohio, said on Wednesday, when he announced that he was suspending his campaign for the Presidency. “I expect that we’re going to have more visits as a result.” He had made the decision to get out of the race, aides later told reporters, as he sat on the runway at what the Columbus Dispatch described as “a humble charter aircraft facility” in Ohio; the plane was supposed to take him to the Washington, D.C., area for a series of a events, including a number of fund-raisers. He apparently didn’t feel good about asking for money that wasn’t going to buy anything. He did like to travel, though. The prop that his speech, which was delivered in a wood-panelled barn in Columbus, seemed to lack was a Kodak carousel of slides from his trips to New Hampshire (“I visited these beautiful, beautiful towns”), Florida (“the energy of Miami Beach”), California (“being able to sit in traffic in Los Angeles!”), and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (“I never knew it was actually located above Wisconsin”). He recalled that, when he arrived in that part of Michigan with his campaign staff members, he told them, “Would you all please put down your phone, because this is a winter wonderland. This is magical.” He did not mention the name that they may have been reading on their phones while he exhorted them to stare at the snow: Donald Trump.

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Related:
Is the Alt-Right for Real?
Senate Officially Mourns Return of Ted Cruz
Why Cruz, and the G.O.P., Lost to Trump

Is the Alt-Right for Real?

A strange, fascinating story broke last week, one that contains the darkness of the Trump campaign and that has, like the Trump campaign at times, the cadence of a joke. A thirty-two-year-old man named Colin Lokey confessed to Bloomberg that, until days earlier, he had been one of the unknown authors of Zero Hedge, a blog that combines analysis of the financial markets, emphasizing the essential corruption of Wall Street, with what CNNMoney once called “a deeply conspiratorial, anti-establishment and pessimistic view of the world.” Each post on Zero Hedge is written under the pseudonym Tyler Durden, Brad Pitt’s character from “Fight Club,” a workingman’s nihilist. Lokey revealed to Bloomberg last week that Durden was actually three men: two wealthy financial analysts, Daniel Ivandjiiski and Tim Backshall, and Lokey, a recent M.B.A. from East Tennessee State University—their hired hand.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
John Kasich Drifts Away
Why Bernie Sanders Is Staying in the Race
Bonus Daily Cartoon: Earth Reacts to Trump’s Victory