George Packer's Blog, page 229

A Perfect N.B.A. Season

There’s evidence of something like mercy, I think, in the fact that, for the past five and a half months, during the doldrums of the most disorienting, and often depressing, Presidential campaign that anyone can remember, basketball fans were treated to a basically perfect—or, at least, perfectly entertaining—N.B.A. regular season. That word, “season,” seemed borrowed, this year, from another medium: what we saw in the National Basketball Association was like a long set of interlocking story arcs plucked from a prestige cable TV show, or from several of them. LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers fittingly gave us the sports world’s equivalent of “Game of Thrones,” with a prematurely fallen (or ruthlessly executed) coach, and teammates cycling in and out of favor with the king. The San Antonio Spurs operated more along the lines of sci-fi, continuing their nearly twenty-year experiment in barely believable excellence, not so much incorporating the forward LaMarcus Aldridge into a preëxisting system as building a new one around him and the cyborg-like Kawhi Leonard on the fly. Fans of “24” could stay glued to the Chicago Bulls, as some explosive in their locker room ticked to zero. And the fabulously gifted young players on the Minnesota Timberwolves—Andrew Wiggins, Zach LaVine, and, especially, Karl-Anthony Towns—provided hope of plotlines to come.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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When the Maysles Brothers Filmed the Beatles
A Young Artist Confronts the Sinking of the Titanic

Donald Trump vs. New York City

Early on Thursday evening, at a Shut Down Trump rally on Manhattan’s Forty-second Street, a thickset man in an orange beanie took the mike. “I’m Paul Harris,” he began. “I’m from Jamaica, and I’m a gay immigrant trying to seek asylum. I say no to Trump, no to racism.” Hundreds of people had taken over a long stretch of sidewalk outside Grand Central Terminal; they had come out with groups like Black Lives Matter and Fight for 15 to protest Trump as a “racist tool of the rich,” according to a sign billowing behind Harris. A couple of hours later, at the nearby Grand Hyatt, the candidate addressed the New York State Republican Gala, as did Ted Cruz and John Kasich. There, Trump encouraged the audience to “take a look outside. These are paid protesters, folks. They’ve got the most beautiful signs. . . . If they’re real protesters, we want those signs made in the basement.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Clinton, Sanders, and the Myth of a Monolithic “Black Vote”
Bernie and Hillary on the Waterfront
The Democratic Debate: A Surprising Exchange on Israel

Clinton, Sanders, and the Myth of a Monolithic “Black Vote”

Many believe that Bernie Sanders will lose the Democratic primary to Hillary Clinton in part because he cannot galvanize “the black vote.” Writing for The Nation on February 28th, Joan Walsh declared, “When the history of the 2016 presidential primary is written, if Hillary Clinton is the party’s nominee, it will show that Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign effectively ended in South Carolina.” Why? Because Clinton learned, from 2008, to treat the state “as a proxy for the black Democratic primary vote.” That year, after she lost the state badly to Barack Obama, “her campaign hemorrhaged African-American support” and never recovered. This year, Walsh posits, that is more or less Sanders’s problem.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Donald Trump vs. New York City
Bernie and Hillary on the Waterfront
Daily Cartoon: Friday, April 15th

Bernie and Hillary on the Waterfront

“If a Democratic Congress put a fifteen-dollar minimum-wage bill on your desk, would you sign it?” Wolf Blitzer, of CNN, asked Hillary Clinton at the Democratic debate on Thursday night. “Well, of course I would,” she replied. At that, Bernie Sanders, her opponent, pursed his lips and dipped his head, tracing a semicircle of amazement in the air. Blitzer, who had set up his question by noting that Clinton did not support the fifteen-dollar figure, betrayed a flicker of surprise, too. As Clinton talked about how she had backed unions and others in the fight to secure a fifteen-dollar wage, and was trying herself to raise it—“I always have”—Sanders went through a range of expressions that would have worked for a reaction shot in a nineteen-thirties mob movie set at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which is where, as it happened, the debate was held. At one point, he seemed on the edge of a sarcastic whistle. He tried to interrupt, but Clinton stopped him: she had a qualification to get in.

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”
Daily Cartoon: Friday, April 15th

The Democratic Debate: A Surprising Exchange on Israel

For the first hour or so, last night’s Democratic debate, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was predictable. Bernie Sanders questioned Hillary Clinton’s judgment in voting for the Iraq War and spoke sarcastically about her refusal to release the transcripts of the paid speeches that she made for Goldman Sachs. Clinton suggested that Sanders was a dreamer rather than a doer and pilloried him for his record on gun control. The tone was loud, contentious, and, by the standards of what has been a pretty civil campaign, testy. At one point, the back-and-forth got so heated that Wolf Blitzer, the moderator for CNN, remarked, “If you’re both screaming at each other, the viewers won’t be able to hear either of you.”

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

New Hope for Record Store Day’s Vinyl-Supply Troubles

This Saturday, thousands of retailers around the world will participate in Record Store Day. From Toronto’s June Records to Vienna’s Supersense to Ulaanbaatar’s Dund Gol, music fans will line up, in some cases for many hours, to buy records, meet musicians, and otherwise express their love for melted-plastic disks. There will be free concerts and free beer, and millions of dollars worth of vinyl will be sold.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Los Porkys: The Sexual-Assault Case That’s Shaking Mexico

For several centuries, the port city of Veracruz, located in the Mexican state of the same name, was known for its carnival. Now, though, it’s known for corruption and terror. The state has become territory for the fearsome Zeta drug cartel. According to a study by Mexico’s bureau of statistics, eight out of ten people in the state say they live in fear. At least fifteen journalists have been killed in Veracruz since 2011. During the same period, hundreds of other people have vanished. Father Alejandro Solalinde, one of Mexico’s leading human-rights advocates, has called Veracruz “a factory of forced disappearances.” To many citizens, there is little difference between the rich and the government, and between the government and the criminals.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Stories We Tell About Politics

Popular political entertainments can be a terrible guide to actual politics. Take “House of Cards,” Netflix’s wonderfully well acted and photographed tale of Frank and Claire Underwood, our modern Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth (played by Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright), whose rise to power, which includes throwing every ally metaphorically under the bus, and Kate Mara actually under a Washington Metro train, hold its addicts mesmerized. And yet, interestingly, the show is not at all astute about the actual political practices and exigencies of this moment; in fact, at moments it is horribly obtuse about them. In the show’s second season, for instance, Claire Underwood became the victim of leaked photographs showing her first in her photographer lover’s bed and then in his shower. The Underwoods’ sleazy communications guy fakes another shower picture, to show how easily it’s done, for the same tabloid, and pressure is secretly brought to bear on the photographer. “There will be a little cleanup,” the communications guy says. “But we’re over the hump, I’d say.” In the real world, that tabloid would be the last place such a “scandal” would likely end. There would be deep technical analyses of the photo all over the Web—Photoshopped or not?—while #ClaireInTheShower would become a hashtag, a meme, and an appropriate subject for feminist analysis and indignation: Why is a woman taking a shower being shamed? Although something like this might have happened in 1992, it has nothing at all to do with the political life of images in 2016.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Fish King of Brooklyn Debate Night
Bernie Sanders Takes Greenwich Village
Here’s Why I’m a Proud Godzilla Supporter

The Assad Files in Arabic

This week, The New Yorker published “The Assad Files,” by Ben Taub, an extensive look at a trove of six hundred thousand Syrian government documents that link the country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, to a campaign of detention and interrogation that resulted in mass torture and murder. It’s the clearest proof we have that the cruelty visited on activists and rebels in Syria has been state-sponsored, with orders signed by Assad himself. The leaders of the organization that has recovered these documents, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, believe that, should Assad end up in court, they have sufficient evidence to convict him and his associates of crimes against humanity. Stephen Rapp, who led prosecution teams at the international criminal tribunals in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, said that the documentation “is much richer than anything I’ve seen, and anything I’ve prosecuted in this area.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Swimmer Who Fled Syria
What Putin Has Done for Assad
Comment from the March 7, 2016, Issue

The Fish King of Brooklyn Debate Night

On Wednesday morning, near Pier C at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, workers set up barricades and carried stage equipment past building No. 268, otherwise known as the Duggal Greenhouse, a glass-walled, refurbished warehouse with a clear view of the Williamsburg Bridge. Tonight, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders will take the stage at the Greenhouse for their final scheduled debate, to be broadcast live on CNN, five days before the New York state primary. At the same time, members of the national media will plug in their laptops and connect to the wifi across the street, inside building No. 269, the home of Agger Fish Corp. “I’m kind of an expert in having had a foot in one era, and then a foot in a new era,” Marc Agger, the owner and operator of the company, said, while showing me around his domain.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Stories We Tell About Politics
Bernie Sanders Takes Greenwich Village
Here’s Why I’m a Proud Godzilla Supporter