George Packer's Blog, page 231

Charity, Donald Trump-Style

Donald Trump was in Albany on Monday night, speaking to another big crowd and complaining about how Ted Cruz was robbing him of delegates in places like Colorado and Louisiana. With an eye toward next week’s primary in the Empire State, Trump also reminded the audience of Cruz’s derisive statements about “New York values,” which Cruz has since claimed were only meant to apply to liberal Democrats. “We have the greatest values,” Trump said. “Nobody has values like us.”

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Related:
Hillary Clinton Versus the Nineties
Bill Clinton, Eternal Campaigner
Ted Cruz Meets New York Values

Our New App: The New Yorker Today

Harold Ross, the founder and first editor of The New Yorker, conceived of his Jazz Age invention as a “fifteen-cent comic paper.” The magazine became something deeper than that over the years—and came to cost more than fifteen cents—but it has appeared in people’s mailboxes and on newsstands weekly now for more than ninety years. And, for many decades, it remained exclusively a paper product.

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In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing
Apple at Forty: Steve Jobs Led Us to the Fourth Dimension
Do Teens Read Seriously Anymore?

Hillary Clinton Versus the Nineties

The memory of the nineteen-nineties has suffused the Democratic Presidential primary from the outset. But until last Thursday, when Bill Clinton was confronted by protesters over his 1994 crime bill, the decade’s main political protagonist had not really been engaged. Clinton was speaking in Philadelphia in front of four hundred people, a crowd small enough both to signify his peripheral status and to invite disruption. The protesters, “who won’t let you answer,” Clinton said, trying to quiet them, “are the ones who are afraid of the truth.” Clinton insisted that the crime bill was essentially a progressive document (the assault-weapons ban, money for after-school programming and community policing) that adopted strict sentencing provisions out of political necessity. Joe Biden, who authored the bill, insisted that it would not get out of committee unless Republicans got stricter sentencing as part of the deal, the former President said. Clinton said that he had consulted with African-American leaders, who had told him, “Take this deal, because our kids are being shot in the street by gangs.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Charity, Donald Trump-Style
Bill Clinton, Eternal Campaigner
How to Deal with an Angry Electorate

Bill Clinton, Eternal Campaigner

The former President Bill Clinton apparently was not expecting, when he appeared last week at a campaign event in Philadelphia on behalf of his wife, the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to be confronted by Black Lives Matter protesters over the consequences, intended and not, of one of his Administration’s signature bills—the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Clinton, his voice raised, wanted protesters to believe that it was thanks to this bill that the nation’s crime rate went down, police forces became more diverse, and a federal assault-weapons ban became law, at least until the ban expired, a decade later; he was able recite a fusillade of statistics without it always being clear where they came from or what, exactly, they referred to. The shouting, Clinton’s finger-wagging replies, and the reluctance to accept what others were saying provided a fascinating glimpse of a group with a deeply felt point of view and of a major political figure repeatedly, even stubbornly, grabbing a political third rail and refusing to let go. For all that, as a political actor, he never broke character, never stopped trying to connect, reminding witnesses of his enormous talent as a campaigner as well as his potentially volatile role in his wife’s race for the Presidency.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
How to Deal with an Angry Electorate
Can Bernie Sanders Upset Hillary Clinton in New York?
Donald Trump’s Nuclear Uncle

No Answers in the Murder of Berta Cáceres

When the activist Berta Cáceres was gunned down in her home, last month, the Honduran government, which for years had been warned about mounting threats against her, professed shock and outrage; then it promised an investigation. In Honduras, which has the highest murder rate in the world, these investigations rarely end well: ninety-eight per cent of crimes go unsolved. So President Juan Orlando Hernández, an American ally, quickly claimed to be working with the F.B.I. to get answers about Cáceres’s murder. His government also sought the help of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Death of Berta Cáceres
What’s Next for Immigrant Families in Detention?
A Contested Election in Honduras

Ted Cruz Meets New York Values

“Show us your matzo, pick up your matzo!” a man enjoined Senator Ted Cruz and a group of small children at the Chabad Neshama Center, in Brighton Beach, last week. Cruz had been diligently rolling dough alongside them at a table set up in the center’s model bakery. And he sang, or moved his lips to, the Passover song “Dayenu,” or “It would be enough.” Given that, in other states, Cruz had tried to drum up votes by insulting “New York values,” it might have been expected that someone would empty a bag of flour over his head. But New York is a tolerant and welcoming city, and so, instead, the candidate was given freshly baked matzo, which he ate with a smile. Cruz is not going to get what he deserves in New York. Instead, he might get what he wants.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Can Bernie Sanders Upset Hillary Clinton in New York?
Donald Trump’s Nuclear Uncle
Trump’s Convention Strategy: “The Fix Is In”

The 2016 Masters: Jordan Spieth Gets the Yorkshire Treatment

As Jordan Spieth, the wonder boy of American golf, was heading for the back nine holes of the Masters tournament, at Augusta National, on Sunday afternoon, the television commentators maintained the hushed, almost reverential tones that tradition and the organizers of the event demand. But four thousand miles away, in Birmingham, England, P. J. Willett, a local schoolteacher, was getting tired of Spieth’s meticulous style of play, which involves studying his shots from every angle, discussing the possibilities with his caddy, and, quite often, backing off once or twice before he finally strikes the ball. “Spieth is lining up his putt,” Willett tweeted. “If I’m quick I can get a beer, go to the toilet, and paint the spare room b4 he hits it.”

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Related:
Donald Trump’s Troubles Are Just Beginning
The Cartoon Lounge: High Jinks on the Mini-Golf Course
Tiger Woods: How Low Can He Go?

Comment from the April 18, 2016, Issue

In “The Sovereignty of Women,” Jill Lepore considers the possibility that Hillary Clinton will become America’s first female President, and discusses how the sixteenth-century reign of Mary Tudor in England may shed light on the politicking surrounding female rule.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Can Bernie Sanders Upset Hillary Clinton in New York?
Daily Cartoon: Friday, April 8th
The Lessons of Wisconsin: Can Sanders and Cruz Follow Up Their Big Victories?

Can Bernie Sanders Upset Hillary Clinton in New York?

On the face of it, Hillary Clinton shouldn’t have much trouble winning the New York Democratic primary on April 19th. In the 2008 version of this contest, when she was running as a two-term, home-state U.S. senator, she got more than fifty-seven per cent of the vote and defeated Barack Obama by about seventeen percentage points. This time around, Clinton again has a big lead in the polls. A Fox News survey that was released on Sunday showed her getting fifty-three per cent of the vote, and Sanders getting just thirty-seven per cent.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Comment from the April 18, 2016, Issue
Donald Trump’s Nuclear Uncle
Trump’s Convention Strategy: “The Fix Is In”

Uncovering the Luna Colony, a Lost Remnant of Spanish Florida

One Friday last October, Tom Garner was driving through a residential neighborhood of wide lawns and old-growth oaks in Pensacola, Florida, on his way to lunch. Cutting through the cozy quarter, which is adjacent to his own, allowed Garner to avoid an eternally long traffic light across a major highway, and to keep an eye out for freshly turned soil. Garner, an avid lay archeologist, knew that the neighborhood was one of a handful that might sit atop the most important archeological site in Pensacola. That day, he saw what he was on the lookout for: the bare ground of an empty lot, recently cleared for construction.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Florida’s Shadow Country
Donald Trump and the Super Tuesday II View from Mar-a-Lago
Are Cats Domesticated?