George Packer's Blog, page 224

A Chess Renaissance in the Midwest

Last month, in Moscow, Fabiano Caruana played chess for two weeks at the Candidates Cup, whose winner, each year, goes on to face the sitting world champion. By the end, the twenty-three-year-old American—born in Miami, raised in Brooklyn, with no formal education after middle school other than chess-studying stints in Madrid, Budapest, Lugano, and elsewhere—was one game away from earning the right to challenge Magnus Carlsen, the twenty-five-year-old Norwegian who has been the best chess player in the world for much of the past six years, and who, in 2014, achieved the highest chess rating in history.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Two American Answers to the Refugee Question
Bobby Fischer and the Difficulty of Making Movies About Geniuses
The Return of the Chess Cheat

Donald Trump’s Very Republican Foreign-Policy Speech

Donald Trump’s foreign-policy speech, which he delivered on Wednesday, in Washington, was—predictably—denounced by many conservatives as facile and incoherent. It was “filled with internal contradictions, falsehoods and genuinely crazy assertions,” Jennifer Rubin, of the Washington Post, wrote. At The Weekly Standard, a podcast discussing the speech was headlined “Defining Presidential Down.” At National Review, Andrew McCarthy, seizing on the words of the day, dubbed the speech “incoherent and shallow.”

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Related:
Cruz Hopes to Tap Into Immense Popularity of Carly Fiorina
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, April 27th
Trump Versus Clinton’s “Woman Card”

Why Digital Money Hasn’t Killed Cash

Never has it been easier to spend your money, if you should happen to have some. The press of a button, the swipe of a card, or the wave of a phone, and it’s done. Transferring it to Panama is no problem if you are not too persnickety about the legalities. Asking for it from friends (once a fraught transaction) is just a virtual trip to PayPal or Venmo. If you are in business for yourself, Square or Stripe will set you up with a card reader in a day, so that you, too, can take credit just like Amazon. Bankers talk about promiscuous person-to-person transactions with the gusto of free-love gurus.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
China’s Economic Slowdown: How Bad Is It?
China Gambles with the Yuan
What the Women of Women on 20s Think of Women on Tens

On the Run in Burundi

“Where there are people, there is conflict,” a Burundian saying goes. It has been relevant in this tiny Francophone country for as long as most of its inhabitants can remember. Perhaps no African state has suffered so much with so little outcry, or even notice, from the world, for which Burundi holds little geopolitical or economic significance. “There’s no social contract sealed among Burundians,” Melchior Nzigamasabo, a Burundian political observer and a liaison to the British High Commission, told me.“The country’s defining characteristic is disagreement.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Telling a Different Story About Africa
How Broadway Imagines Africa
Dance, Burkina Faso

What Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” Can (and Can’t) Do for Tidal

On Saturday, the pop superstar Beyoncé Knowles-Carter surprised the world with “Lemonade,” a concept album about the challenges of monogamous love. (In her case, this involves being married to the man behind “Big Pimpin’. ”) Launched through Tidal, the streaming service controlled by her husband, Jay Z, the album guides listeners though a catalogue of infidelities and indignant responses, ending with a nod toward forgiveness. The release was accompanied by a meandering hour-plus HBO special that brought to mind a Terrence Malick musical. A swaggerless Jay appears briefly, around the forty-one-minute mark, wearing a hangdog expression.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
When Politicians Make Playlists
Will Jay Z’s New Music Service Really Be Good for Musicians?
Eight Bits of Advice About the Music Business

The Legacy of a Soccer Tragedy

On April 15th, 1989, Trevor and Jenni Hicks and their two teen-age daughters travelled from Liverpool, England, to Hillsborough stadium, in Sheffield, to watch their favorite soccer team play in a semifinal cup match. It was a sunny Saturday in the usually dreary north of England. About an hour before kickoff, the family split up. Jenni had a ticket for a seat in one of the stadium’s terraces, while her husband and daughters would be standing in one of Hillsborough’s “pens”—sections enclosed by high fences meant to contain the visiting team’s supporters. The match promised a thrilling afternoon, a chance for Liverpool to display its dominance, fielding legends such as Peter Beardsley and John Barnes. Trevor told his girls, Sarah and Vicki, to go on ahead while he waited in a concession line to buy coffee. Then something terrible happened.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Downfall of a Russian Soccer Team
In Defense of the Super Bowl
Sunday-Night Football Catastrophe

Trump Versus Clinton’s “Woman Card”

“As far as I am concerned, it’s over,” Donald Trump said on Tuesday night, after sweeping five Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states. “I consider myself the presumptive nominee.” Trump is prone to premature self-congratulation. But his impression of his own strength, as a candidate, is now largely correct. By the time that Trump stepped before admirers at Trump Tower, it was clear that he had won by at least thirty percentage points in the so-called Acela primaries (Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island). The result puts him, at most, one or two states short of securing the twelve hundred and thirty-seven delegates he needs to avoid an open Convention. The best chance for his rivals to stop him will be to deprive him of the fifty-seven delegates available in Indiana, on May 3rd, where he is ahead by about six per cent in recent polls.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Cruz Hopes To Tap Into Immense Popularity of Carly Fiorina
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, April 27th
Cruz and Kasich (and the G.O.P.) Give Up on the Northeast

A Whistle-Blower Behind Bars

On January 24, 2013, the Florida Department of Corrections received a grievance letter from an inmate named Harold Hempstead, who was imprisoned at the Dade Correctional Institution. The letter was brief and its tone was matter-of-fact, but the allegations it contained were shocking, raising troubling questions about the death of a mentally ill inmate named Darren Rainey, who had collapsed in a shower seven months earlier, on June 23, 2012—a case that I wrote about in the magazine this week. According to Hempstead’s letter, the death had been misrepresented to disguise the abuse that preceded it. The reason Rainey collapsed in the shower, Hempstead alleged, was that he had been locked in the stall by guards, who directed scalding water at him. Hempstead’s cell was directly below the shower. That night, he had heard Rainey yelling, “I can’t take it no more,” he recalled. Then he heard a loud thud—which he believed was the sound of Rainey falling to the ground—and the yelling stopped. Hempstead concluded his letter by calling for an investigation.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Uncovering the Luna Colony, a Lost Remnant of Spanish Florida
Florida’s Shadow Country
Donald Trump and the Super Tuesday II View from Mar-a-Lago

Koch for Clinton? Not a Chance

Judging from the media hype surrounding Charles Koch’s interview, this past Sunday, with Jonathan Karl on ABC, you would think that the Koch brothers have undergone some kind of miraculous political conversion. ABC blasted out several breathless news alerts from the interview, saying that it was “possible” that Koch might prefer Hillary Clinton to the Republican Presidential candidates, and that he is so disenchanted with the Party’s options that he won’t even go to its convention. These bulletins have been swallowed and then regurgitated by one media outlet after the next, which in turn have spawned a wave of punditry, mostly concluding that Koch’s alleged transformation is the latest proof of the G.O.P. establishment’s dire dislike of Donald Trump.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Cruz and Kasich (and the G.O.P.) Give Up on the Northeast
Cruz and Kasich’s Sorry Plan to Stop Trump
The Anti-Moneyball Election

No Refereeing Is Bad Refereeing

When the New York Islanders take the ice on Wednesday night for the first game of their second-round playoff series against the Tampa Bay Lightning, they can be grateful to their captain, John Tavares, who scored both goals in their series-clinching, double-overtime comeback win against the Florida Panthers on Sunday. But the Islanders have someone else to thank, too: the officials at that Panther game. Tavares’s performance that night was exceptional—he tied the game, with fifty-four seconds to go in the third period, and then scored a beautiful wraparound goal in overtime—but he was only in position to become a hero because of what Sporting News termed “the worst non-call of the playoffs.” Just before he scored the game-tying goal, the Panthers had the puck in the Islanders’ defensive zone with the net empty (the Islanders had pulled their goalie in favor of an extra forward). As Florida’s Vincent Trocheck went to shoot, the Islanders’ Matt Martin, diving to knock the puck away, tripped Trocheck, who fell to the ice. Trocheck lost the puck, and the Islanders eventually retrieved it, leading to a rush that culminated in Tavares’s goal.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why Banks Don’t Play It Safe, Even When It Costs Them
Curt Schilling, Internet Embarrassment
When Yao Ming Was the Center of the World