George Packer's Blog, page 232

The New Morality of Pope Francis

I could have used Pope Francis’s latest apostolic exhortation, “Amoris Laetitia” (“The Joy of Love”), when I served as a Catholic priest, almost half a century ago. I was ordained in early 1969, a few months after the promulgation of “Humanae Vitae,” the Vatican’s resounding condemnation of “artificial birth control,” which would define my future. I was a chaplain at a university where, true to the era, the norms of sexual morality had been upended. I certainly saw the need, in those wild days, for a humane and ethical analysis of the state of sexual intimacy, personal commitment, erotic longing, and gender rights. But, believe me, the triumphalist salvo from Rome made the moral condition worse, not better. Like many priests of my generation, I declined to affirm the birth-control teaching. On the contrary, I encouraged the young people who sought my advice to be sexually responsible, especially since the mature use of contraceptives could avoid a later choice about abortion.

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The Catholic Movement Against Capital Punishment
From Trump to Zika: Pope Francis’s Eventful Plane Ride
Copy-Editing Trump

Donald Trump’s Nuclear Uncle

In September, 1936, a reporter for the Associated Press watched the unveiling of a new kind of X-ray machine, said to be able to generate a million volts of power. The scientist operating the device was John G. Trump, a professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Trump was working the controls and explaining how high-speed electrons ran along a porcelain tube to a “water-cooled gold target,” when suddenly “two of the high-voltage sparks hit him squarely on the nose.” And yet, according to the A.P. account, the direct strike caused him only “slight discomfort.” Professor Trump told the reporter, “That’s an advantage of this machine. It’s completely grounded and those sparks can’t kill you.”

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Trump’s Convention Strategy: “The Fix Is In”
A Political Satirist for the Internet Election
How Donald Trump Wasted His Spring Break

Facebook Live: Now You Can Never Leave

It’s often difficult inside a closed system to see the boundaries that surround you. Sometimes you think you can see the whole of the universe. This is how closed systems like it: their inhabitants looking out through a distorted curvature that gives shape to space that is not there. This is how Facebook, Apple, and other technology platforms hope to trap and keep you. Sated, oblivious, and well fed. But human beings are not good with closed systems, and so, eventually, we see the fences, and then we run our hands along them to feel for shape and structure. We study how the fence weaves into and out of the trees. And one day, when the sun has gone down and the guards are asleep, we catapult over to the other side, and see all the things we couldn’t see before.

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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
Journal from a #Blessed Road Trip, Inspired by Henry David Thoreau

Trump’s Convention Strategy: “The Fix Is In”

More than three months before any ballots have been cast at the Republican convention, Roger Stone, Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again consigliere, has delivered the campaign equivalent of a severed horse head to delegates who might consider denying Trump the nomination. Trump’s supporters will find you in your sleep, he merrily informed them this week. He did not mean it metaphorically.

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Related:
Donald Trump’s Nuclear Uncle
A Political Satirist for the Internet Election
How Donald Trump Wasted His Spring Break

When Yao Ming Was the Center of the World

In the late nineties, before low-grade video clips of obscure basketball leagues circulated the Internet with ease, I remember hearing about Yao Ming, a Chinese basketball prospect who was exceptionally tall, even by the standards of the National Basketball Association. His parents, people said, were giants as well, and the Chinese government had apparently marshalled their resources to insure his development as an agile, skillful, all-world center. For some reason, I was immediately overcome with a desire for Yao, whom I had never seen play or heard speak, to end up seeming like more than a novelty.

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The 2016 Masters: Can Phil Mickelson Beat the Young Guns?
Enjoying March Without the Madness
An Awkward Farewell to Kobe Bryant

The Supreme Court Extremism of Clarence Thomas and Chuck Grassley

There’s been so much dramatic news about the Supreme Court in recent days that it’s easy to miss some of it. Indeed, the action has been so intense that there are signs that some of the protagonists may be becoming almost unhinged. Consider, for example, the recent behavior of Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, and Justice Clarence Thomas.

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4–4 at the Supreme Court
Reasons Why I, Mitch McConnell, Can’t Meet with Merrick Garland
Bonus Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, March 16th

Valeant: Why Moneyball Failed in the Pharmaceutical Industry

The past few months have been terrible ones for investors in Valeant Pharmaceuticals. In February, the company disclosed that it had accounted incorrectly for fifty-eight million dollars worth of sales by Philidor, a specialty pharmacy that it owned before shutting it down last fall amid allegations that it was using dubious tactics to get insurers to pay for drugs. At that time, Valeant announced that it would have to review and restate its earnings from the past two years as a result. Last month, the company reported disappointing preliminary earnings for the fourth quarter of 2015, and said that it wouldn’t be able to file its annual report on time, sending its stock down fifty per cent in a single day. And just last week, amid a barrage of stories about Valeant’s myriad problems (including my most recent column in the magazine), Moody’s lowered its rating on Valeant’s thirty-two billion dollars of debt, and Congress subpoenaed the company’s outgoing C.E.O., a former McKinsey consultant named Michael Pearson, to testify about price gouging in the pharmaceutical industry.

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A Debt Deal to Keep Greece in the Eurozone?
Will Angela Merkel Save the European Ideal?
Greece and Europe: The Endgame

The Swimmer Who Fled Syria

In early March, the International Olympic Committee announced that there would be a team of refugees at the Games in Rio de Janeiro this summer—five to ten athletes whose refugee status has been verified by the United Nations and who will compete under the Olympic flag. When Sven Spannekrebs, a swimming coach based in Berlin, learned of the announcement, he knew right away that one of his swimmers—Yusra Mardini, an eighteen-year-old Syrian who has a real shot at making the team—was about to get a lot of attention. But neither he nor Mardini realized just how much. The day the news broke, he “was called twenty times,” he said. “I took my phone and threw it into the fridge.” They arranged a meeting with the press, and, on a morning later that month, journalists from across Europe and as far away as Japan gathered in the conference room of a local sports club to meet the two. Mardini, clad in a black hoodie, skinny jeans, and gleaming white Adidas sneakers, looked fresh-faced and slightly bemused by all the fuss.

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Related:
What Putin Has Done for Assad
Comment from the March 7, 2016, Issue
A Moment for Hope in Syria

Race, Art, and Essentialism

“You know what?” the novelist Rick Moody began his Sunday Times review of the novelist James McBride’s new book about James Brown, “Kill ’Em and Leave.” What thought compelled Moody to snag his reader’s attention with the print equivalent of a blind-side shove? This: “It’s an undeniable truth that when African-American writers write about African-American musicians, there are penetrating insights and varieties of context that are otherwise lost to the nonblack music aficionados of the world, no matter how broad the appeal of the musician under scrutiny.” By virtue of being black, Moody goes on, Stanley Crouch could plumb the depths of jazz and Nelson George could limn the contours of funk and soul more completely and knowledgeably than the most sensitive, music-literate, passionately enthusiastic white critic. Not only is this “undeniable,” it’s also, as Moody sees it, a really good thing: “This contemporary tendency in which black writers lay claim to the discourse of black music—this increasing tendency—is a much needed development for anyone who cares about modern music.”

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Related:
The People v. O. J. Simpson Will Be with Us Forever
James Baldwin’s Hypothetical Country
Marquette King Is the N.F.L.’s Only Black Punter. How Come?

The Return of Moqtada al-Sadr, an Iraqi Operator

Beyond the gruesome military showdown with ISIS, politics in Iraq, such as it exists, revolves around a small cabal of former insurgents. All of them were political players long before the U.S. invasion of 2003, and they variously endured imprisonment, torture, exile, assassination attempts, and all-out warfare for their opposition to Saddam Hussein, and then survived to compete for the spoils of power. Some gained control of vast resources through their authority over lucrative government ministries. Some command their own militias as well as portions of the country’s security forces. The original list of players included the Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Mustafa Barzani, the secular Shiite politicians Iyad Allawi and the late Ahmad Chalabi, the Shiite Islamists Ibrahim al-Jaafari and Nuri al-Maliki, and the late clerical Shiite brothers Muhammad Bakr and Abdulaziz al-Hakim. One of the most intriguing additions to this group is the radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, an arriviste of forty-two who has never held elected office but who now commands thousands and has established himself as a key power broker in the country.

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Related:
The Pigeon Boy and Other Forgotten Fugitives from ISIS
Iraqis Celebrate as Threat of Third Bush Presidency is Over
One of Africa’s Biggest Dams Is Falling Apart