George Packer's Blog, page 228

Postscript: Bill Campbell, 1940-2016

In the brief history of modern Silicon Valley, Bill Campbell, who died yesterday, at the age of seventy-five, is a giant. His various titles—Columbia football coach, Apple executive, co-founder of Go Corp., Intuit C.E.O., chairman of Apple, chairman of the Columbia University board—do not convey his influence. In the world capital of engineering, where per-capita income can seem inversely related to social skills, Campbell was the man who taught founders to look up from their computer screens. He was known throughout the Valley as “the Coach,” the experienced executive who added a touch of humanity as he quietly instructed Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, the founders of Twitter, Sheryl Sandberg, and countless other entrepreneurs on the human dimensions of management, on the importance of listening to employees and customers, of partnering with others. His obituary was not featured on the front of most newspapers, or at the top of most technology news sites, but it should have been.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Apple at Forty: Steve Jobs Led Us to the Fourth Dimension
The Breathless Rhetoric (and Prosaic Economics) of Virtual Reality
Lessons from Apple vs. the F.B.I.

The Verizon Strikers’ Shrinking World

A picket line is to a Democrat what a revival meeting is to an evangelical, so when Verizon workers went on strike last week, in one of the biggest labor actions in a decade, both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton made sure to come out for the thirty-nine thousand workers represented by the union.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Section 215 Wrecking Ball
Scott Walker Decides He Isn’t Conservative Enough
Why Everyone Was Wrong About Net Neutrality

On Immigration, the Supreme Court Sounds More Like Congress

Supreme Court arguments are starting to resemble Supreme Court confirmation hearings (which it used to be customary to hold for nominees way back in the days before, well, 2016). During confirmation hearings, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee from both parties take turns asking questions. Senators from the President’s party ask softballs, in a sort of direct examination; senators from the opposition party try to throw the nominee off stride with what seems more like cross-examination. Back and forth go the senators, and the questions, until, most of the time, they vote along party lines anyway.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump in Patchogue
The Democratic Debate: A Surprising Exchange on Israel
Ben Carson Says He Has No Memory of Running for President

Did the New York Primary Campaign Change Anything?

On the final day before the New York primary, the candidates from both parties were busy campaigning across the state. Hillary Clinton ate ice cream in the East Village, drank bubble tea in Flushing, and gave a speech at the Hilton on Sixth Avenue. Bernie Sanders held an election-eve rally in Long Island City. Donald Trump flew to Buffalo, where he had an event scheduled for the evening. Ted Cruz was in Times Square for an appearance on “Good Morning America.” John Kasich held town-hall meetings in Syracuse and Schenectady.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Bernie Sanders’s Forty-Year-Old Idea
Donald Trump in Patchogue
Donald Trump vs. New York City

Three Pulitzers for New Yorker Writers

Three writers for The New Yorker have won a 2016 Pulitzer Prize, and we’d like for you to get another chance to read their award-winning work.

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Related:
Wigwag: The Magazine That Lex Built
Pulitzers and Power Brokers
Back Issues: Bellevue’s Pulitzer

Comment from the April 25, 2016, Issue

In “Working-Class Heroes,” Jelani Cobb examines how the 2016 election has made it clear that both the American public and its political representatives don’t how to talk about class.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Comment from the April 18, 2016, Issue
Comment from the April 11, 2016, Issue
Comment from the April 4, 2016, Issue

Bernie Sanders’s Forty-Year-Old Idea

Bernie Sanders has been campaigning in New York, where he grew up, but in a real sense his gaze remains focussed on Northern Europe. In his effort to make American society fairer, he has looked, throughout his run for the Presidency, at countries whose welfare states were built by Europe’s Social Democratic parties. But there’s an underlying oddity: while Sanders’s calls for a redistribution of wealth and for state intervention—in health care, education, the financial system—echo what the Social Democrats of Europe were up to in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, his views often clash with the policies of those parties today. “What Sanders is saying has not been said in Europe for decades,” Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist at the University of Georgia, whose specialty is European political movements, said.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump in Patchogue
Donald Trump vs. New York City
Clinton, Sanders, and the Myth of a Monolithic “Black Vote”

Life-Expectancy Inequality Grows in America

There may be no better way to appreciate humanity’s growing prosperity than to consider how long we live. A child born in 1900—little more than a century ago—was likely, on average, to die by the age of thirty. Today, according to the World Bank, the comparable figure is seventy-one. That is a worldwide average and so, of course, there is a considerable gulf between rich countries in Europe and Asia, where people live into their eighties, and the poorest nations in sub-Saharan Africa, where people born today will struggle to live to fifty. Nonetheless, even a child born in Chad, which has the world’s lowest life expectancy—49.81 years—will live two years longer than did the average white American male born in 1900.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, March 29th
Bernie Sanders and the Realists
The Many Problems with Bernie Sanders’s Health-Care Plan

Donald Trump in Patchogue

Eight years ago, Patchogue, New York, was the site of a horrific hate crime. Seven high-school students, who had set out to attack an immigrant, killed a thirty-seven-year-old Ecuadorian named Marcelo Lucero. Patchogue, a small, blue-collar town on Long Island with a growing immigrant population, became a symbol of how racism and resentment could overtake a community. At the behest of the town council, the federal government intervened to reform the Suffolk County Police Department, which was accused of failing to adequately address anti-Latino violence. The local clergy organized regular vigils. The mayor even travelled to Lucero’s home town in Ecuador to apologize for the tragedy. Over the past several years, residents and officials have tried to restore a sense of trust, and by most accounts they have succeeded. But last week brought ominous news. The Suffolk County Republicans announced that Donald Trump had accepted an invitation to headline a fundraiser in Patchogue, on Thursday, April 14th, at a night club called the Emporium, which is just down the road from where Lucero was killed. The idea that Trump would bring his nativist effrontery to Patchogue struck the immigrant community and many others as a potentially dangerous provocation.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Donald Trump vs. New York City
Clinton, Sanders, and the Myth of a Monolithic “Black Vote”
Bernie and Hillary on the Waterfront

A Murder Rocks New Orleans

On April 9th, just before 11:30 P.M., three cars got into an accident at the corner of Sophie Wright Place and Felicity Street, a residential block in New Orleans’s Lower Garden District. An orange Hummer H2 rammed into the back of a silver Mercedes-Benz G63 S.U.V. which, in turn, surged forward into a gray Chevy Impala. The drivers of the Mercedes and Hummer got out of their vehicles. One was Will Smith, a thirty-four-year-old former defensive end for the New Orleans Saints and a local hero. The other, the driver of the Hummer, was a 28-year-old named Cardell Hayes. The two men exchanged words, things escalated, and Hayes opened fire with a .45-calibre pistol, shooting Smith eight times, including seven in the back. Smith’s wife, who had been with him in the car, was also shot once in each leg. Smith died at the scene, slumped half in and half out of the front seat of his car. Hayes waited for the police to arrive.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
New Orleans’s Queen of Creole Cooking, at Ninety-Three
Bruce Gilden’s Mardi Gras
The Bravery in the N.B.A.’s Push Against Gun Violence