George Packer's Blog, page 234

The Pill that Still Hasn’t Changed the Politics of Abortion

When the abortion drug mifepristone first became legally available in the U.S., in 2000, it seemed to carry with it the potential for a ceasefire in the abortion wars. Because the pills could be administered in a variety of medical settings, and the abortion itself took place at home, the new regimen offered an alternative to the freestanding clinics that had become flashpoints for protest. So-called medical (as opposed to surgical) abortions could occur earlier in gestation, almost as soon as a woman realized that she was pregnant. Americans had fewer moral qualms about abortions performed at this stage, and women preferred to have them then. The drug seemed to unfurl a vision of the future in which abortion was less politicized, more private, and more seamlessly and matter-of-factly folded into heath care. In 1999, I wrote a story on the subject, which my editors at the Times Magazine headlined “The Little White Bombshell: This Pill Will Change Everything.” It was hype, but it reflected a mood that was real.

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Published on April 04, 2016 17:30

Enjoying March Without the Madness

At a crowded bar in midtown Manhattan one recent evening, I spotted a photograph, posted to the door: two blond babies, one laughing, the other crying, and Photoshopped onto their little white shirts the logos, respectively, of the North Carolina Tar Heels and the Duke University Blue Devils. This was a Tar Heel bar, so the Blue Devil baby sobbed hysterically, a nod to the schools’ bitter rivalry. On a large flat-screen television, North Carolina, on the way to their nineteenth Final Four, and tenth National Championship appearance, was facing off against a tenacious but overmatched Indiana team. Beer was served in light-blue cups, shipped, I was told, from a popular student hangout in Chapel Hill.

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Published on April 04, 2016 16:54

In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing

“Today everything exists to end in a photograph,” Susan Sontag wrote in her seminal 1977 book “On Photography.” This was something I thought about when I recently read that Google was making its one-hundred-and-forty-nine-dollar photo-editing suite, the Google Nik Collection, free. This photo-editing software is as beloved among photographers as, say, Katz’s Deli is among those who dream of pastrami sandwiches.

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Published on April 04, 2016 13:30

Comment from the April 11, 2016, Issue

In “Global Trump,” Steve Coll writes about Donald Trump’s dubious foreign-policy plans, should he be elected President.

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Published on April 03, 2016 21:00

Sanders, Trump, and the Rise of the Non-Voters

American elections are peculiar instruments of democracy, because they are so consistent in whom they leave out. In the past three Presidential elections, about forty-five per cent of those eligible to vote chose not to. And although this fact has been the subject of some public-spirited anxiety, it has generally not troubled political scientists too much, because it seemed as if non-voters had more or less the same view of the parties as voters did. Stretch the electorate to two-thirds of those eligible, or three-quarters, or make voting mandatory, and it has long seemed that the votes would be distributed in roughly equivalent proportions: about half the vote for Democrats, half for Republicans, with some variability reserved for the shape of current events.

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Published on April 01, 2016 13:46

4–4 at the Supreme Court

This week, the Supreme Court began to look even more like the rest of the American political landscape. It was already an institution influenced and divided by ideology—perhaps it always has been one. But, with a seat left empty by the death, last month, of Justice Antonin Scalia, and with the Republicans in the Senate refusing to consider anyone to fill it, there are indications of other tendencies taking root, too. Like Congress, the Court may be not only splitting but fracturing into ineffectuality. Rationality may yet prevail, but, given the way that the Presidential race is going, it’s worth taking a moment to look at some judicial worst-case scenarios. For example, the only thing worse than a partisan Court may be one in which partisan fights find no national resolution.

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Published on April 01, 2016 09:01

Cuba After Obama Left

In the first hours after President Barack Obama’s address to the Cuban people last Tuesday, which he delivered on the main stage of Havana’s impeccably restored nineteenth-century Gran Teatro, several Cubans I know told me how moved by it they had been; some confessed to having wept. Many quoted specific lines from what was a carefully nuanced piece of speechwriting: “I have come here to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas” was one. There were mentions, too, of Obama’s story about himself as the son of an African student and a white American woman, and of how “democracy” had made it possible for him to become President of the United States. These Cubans, who were from all walks of life, were impressed, too, by Obama’s easy charisma and his use of Cuban catchphrases and witticisms, and a couple of them recalled his praise of Cuban resourcefulness when he said, in Spanish, “el cubano inventa del aire”— roughly, Cubans are able to make things out of nothing. Obama also deftly balanced appeals for greater freedom in Cuba with acknowledgements of endemic American ills, such as racism. Raúl Castro’s presence in the theatre audience seemed to signal his endorsement for much of what Obama said—or at least a certain acquiescence to its spirit. When Obama left the stage, Castro stood alongside Cuba’s ancient prima ballerina, Alicia Alonso, held up both hands in clasped fashion, and grinned broadly. Cubans in the audience shouted “Viva, viva,” as if to acknowledge the shared triumph of Obama’s visit and the reconciliation under way between the two nations.

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Published on March 31, 2016 21:00

Is Donald Trump Self-Destructing?

If Donald Trump were a normal political candidate, he would be in serious trouble at the moment. Over the past few days, he has said and done things that have raised more doubts about his temperament, judgment, and command of policy issues. Some of the Republicans trying to prevent him from becoming the Party’s Presidential nominee believe that they’re finally making progress. Are they right?

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Published on March 31, 2016 14:56

The Streets of Brussels

Heinous plots are often hatched in unassuming places. The young men who killed a hundred and thirty people in Paris, in November, and thirty-two in Brussels, last week, finalized logistics in drab apartments, like the one on the top floor of 4 Rue Max Roos, in Schaerbeek, on the outskirts of the Belgian capital. It was there that Ibrahim and Khalid el-Bakraoui lived with the ISIS-trained bomb maker Najim Laachraoui, mixed chemicals, and summoned a taxi to transport explosives-laden suitcases to the airport. When their landlord noticed unpleasant odors seeping through the walls, he thought of bleach or drugs, not a terrorist attack.

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Published on March 31, 2016 13:30

How the Minimum-Wage Movement Entered the Mainstream

When Kshama Sawant won election to the Seattle City Council, in 2013, running under the banner of the Socialist Alternative party, she seemed in the assembly of American politics a genuinely new figure: a forty-year-old Indian-born engineer and economist, a defector from the technocracy in that most technocratic city, a socialist too young to project the factional mustiness of the City College cafeteria. Her highest-profile endorsements were from grunge musicians, and much of the moral outrage that Sawant channelled had to do with gentrification. She ran on the platform of a fifteen-dollar-per-hour minimum wage and then, in office, pressed the issue. When the cause seemed to her to be drowning in overly large and platitudinous meetings, Sawant told reporters that if the city council and mayor did not adopt the issue, she would take it to voters as a ballot initiative. Soon they did.

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Published on March 31, 2016 12:03