George Packer's Blog, page 230

The Panama Papers and the Monster Stories of the Future

The movie “Spotlight,” which for many journalists provided a jolt of pure gratification, follows the canonical story line for news-biz triumphs. A determined team at a major-league newspaper, led by a brave and supportive editor, is permitted to spend months relentlessly chasing down a major story. Sources help, of course, but they need to be persuaded and verified, and there is much more to the work than simply receiving material. Finally, after many setbacks that would have daunted ordinary mortals, the team fits all the pieces together. The presses roll. Justice is done. Nobody but a big news organization could have accomplished this.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Secret Life of Panama City
How Edward Snowden Changed Journalism

Bernie Sanders Takes Greenwich Village

Over the years and decades, quite a few tub-thumping radicals have stood up in Washington Square Park and railed at the world, but few, if any, have attracted a crowd like the one Bernie Sanders attracted on Wednesday evening. By mid-afternoon, the New York Police Department had cordoned off the park and the blocks around it. From Houston Street to Eighth Street, and from Sixth Avenue to Broadway, the area was sealed, and inside the barricades long lines of people were waiting to clear security. The campaign later estimated that twenty-seven thousand people attended, in all.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Stories We Tell About Politics
The Fish King of Brooklyn Debate Night
Here’s Why I’m a Proud Godzilla Supporter

Will the Tesla Model 3 Be the First Truly Self-Driving Car?

On the evening of March 31st, Elon Musk unveiled Tesla’s sinuous Model 3, the company’s first “affordable” electric-car model. After touting the sedan’s punchy acceleration, two-hundred-and-fifteen-mile battery range, and sweeping, seamless glass roof, he mentioned its base price of thirty-five thousand dollars and told the audience that prospective buyers had already reserved more than a hundred and fifteen thousand of the vehicles, to rapturous applause and shouts of “You did it!” Not one to miss a marketing trick, Musk capped the night on Twitter, with a cryptic thank-you message that promised more: “Thanks for tuning in to the Model 3 unveil Part 1! Part 2 is super next level, but that’s for later . . . .”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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John Kasich, Protest Candidate

For a long time, the smart money was on John Kasich eating his last campaign-trail meal in a lobster joint on the New Hampshire coast sometime in February, in a scene that even the rookie reporters would have found dingy and sad. But he has endured well into the spring, through the Bronx portion of the Republican contest, obligingly swallowing a monumental portion of Arthur Avenue cured meats. At first, the Party’s professionals tended to look kindly on Kasich’s oddball, lo-fi campaign, because his basic personal decency was a helpful force in an angry primary, but in the past month his sheer endurance, the accumulation of all those meals, has become a problem for them. As long as Kasich stays in the race, he makes it harder for those opposed to Donald Trump to coalesce around a single candidate. The Times devoted a long story, last week, to the Cruz campaign’s mounting exasperation with Kasich’s decision to stay in the race, even though the Ohioan has won only his own state and has barely seemed to compete in much of the country. Cruz said, “Someone is not electable if they can’t get elected.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Stories We Tell About Politics
The Fish King of Brooklyn Debate Night
Bernie Sanders Takes Greenwich Village

Paul Ryan Is Still Running for President

The key to a successful draft campaign is to maintain an aura of deep reluctance.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Charity, Donald Trump-Style
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An Iranian Opposition Leader Pushes to Be Put on Trial

In a melancholy yet defiant open letter, from one revolutionary to another, Mehdi Karroubi pleaded over the weekend to be put on trial in Iran. His dissent could no longer be silenced, he wrote in his letter to President Hassan Rouhani, a former colleague, and he declared, “We must stand up against the idea of a regime with one single voice, made so through monopolizing an unaccountable power.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Bride Wore Green: What a Wedding Says about Iran’s Future
Iran’s Voters Sent a Message to the Hard-Liners
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Golden State and the Mathematical Magic of Seventy-Three

“I am aware of the Warriors’ push for seventy-three wins,” Ken Ono, a professor of mathematics at Emory University and the author of “The Web of Modularity: Arithmetic of the Coefficients of Modular Forms and q-series,” said recently, just before the Golden State Warriors won game number seventy-two, tying the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls for the most victories in a single season by a team in the National Basketball Association. “I was a huge Bulls fan back in the day,” Ono continued. “I went to college at the University of Chicago. Also, I enjoy the fact that Michael Jordan performed well in his math classes at the University of North Carolina. One of my friends had him in class in the early nineteen-eighties, and I remember him telling me that M.J. was a surprisingly strong math student.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Two Years After the Nigerian Girls Were Taken

Late last month, amid a spate of suicide bombings planned by the Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria and across the border in the far north of Cameroon, something strange happened. A vigilante force in a Cameroonian town called Limani stopped a twelve-year-old girl and a thirty-five-year-old woman who were carrying explosives and subsequently handed them over to authorities. While they were being questioned in custody, the girl said she had been sent by Boko Haram to detonate herself, which wasn’t in itself unusual—one of every five suicide bombings that the group has staged or inspired over the last two years has been executed by children, usually young girls. But the girl also said that she had ended up with the Islamist group after it kidnapped her and more than two hundred schoolgirls in the Nigerian town of Chibok in a mass abduction that began on the evening of April 14, 2014, two years ago this Thursday.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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“Game 7, 1986” and the Moments After the Moment That Everyone Remembers

When considering the unfortunate underperformers of the 1986 World Series, between the New York Mets and the Boston Red Sox, the pitcher Ron Darling probably does not come to mind.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, April 6th
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“Game 7, 1986” and the Moments After the Moment that Everyone Remembers

When considering the unfortunate underperformers of the 1986 World Series, between the New York Mets and the Boston Red Sox, the pitcher Ron Darling probably does not come to mind.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, April 6th
Dave Roberts and the Importance of Baseball’s Middle Managers
Noah Syndergaard and the Very Confident New York Mets