George Packer's Blog, page 235

Climate Catastrophe, Coming Even Sooner?

One of the first people to propose that climate change could result in rapid sea-level rise was an eccentric British geographer named John Mercer. A hesitant speaker in public, Mercer was less restrained in private. He was once arrested for jogging naked. It was said that he liked to do his fieldwork in the nude—a curious habit for a man who studied glaciers.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, March 15th
Cover Story: Danny Shanahan’s Rising Seas
The Climate Summit of Money

Erdogan’s March to Dictatorship in Turkey

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s President, is coming to Washington this week, where he’ll probably meet President Obama. It’s a good bet he’ll manage to get in and out of the capital without being subjected to the public humiliation he deserves.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Streets of Brussels
The Strange Origins of TrueCrypt, ISIS’s Favored Encryption Tool
Terror in Brussels

The Breathless Rhetoric (and Prosaic Economics) of Virtual Reality

Walking through the annual South by Southwest Interactive festival earlier this month, in Austin, you got the sense that one segment of the ever-optimistic U.S. tech industry was feeling particularly sunny. With Facebook just weeks away from launching the long-awaited consumer version of the Oculus Rift, which came out this Monday, virtual reality was clearly the belle of the ball. There were demonstrations everywhere, involving the usual suspects (Samsung, Google, cyber-pornographers) and a host of other brands. Budweiser offered V.R. tours of a brewery. McDonald’s allowed guests to paint the inside of a virtual Happy Meal box. Beneath a thirty-foot-tall inflatable rocket, NASA was using the Rift to take virtual tourists to the top of its Space Launch System, the HTC Vive to show them the International Space Station and the moon, and Google Cardboard to get them to Mars.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why Yahoo Couldn’t Adapt to the Smartphone Era
The Man Who Once Made San Franciscans Look Good
Werner Herzog Talks Virtual Reality

Hillary Clinton, Live at the Apollo

The line outside the Apollo Theatre on Wednesday morning snaked along 125th Street and up Frederick Douglass Boulevard, before curling onto 126th. “The next President is going to be here: we love her!” Fanta Kouyate, a child-services worker who had come across the Harlem River from the Bronx, volunteered. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Harriet Natkin, an Upper West Side resident who had come with a couple of friends, said. “I’m a very big Hillary supporter.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Campaign Trade Wars
Donald and Melania and Heidi and Ted
The Lost Generation of the 2016 Campaign

The Strange Origins of TrueCrypt, ISIS’s Favored Encryption Tool

On Tuesday, the Times reporter Rukmini Callimachi published the latest in a series of blockbuster stories about the inner workings of the Islamic State. The piece focussed on the logistics of the group’s deployment of terrorists in Europe, but also included a significant revelation in an ongoing debate about encryption. In ISIS’s training and operational planning, Callimachi reported, the group appeared to routinely use a piece of software called TrueCrypt. When one would-be bomber was dispatched from Syria to France, Callimachi writes, “an Islamic State computer specialist handed him a USB key. It contained CCleaner, a program used to erase a user’s online history on a given computer, as well as TrueCrypt, an encryption program that was widely available at the time and that experts say has not yet been cracked.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Terror in Brussels
Salah Abdeslam, Captured in Brussels
ISIS Chief Abruptly Cancels Meeting with Sean Penn

In Sarajevo, a Dancer in the Dark

Last Thursday, I flew from Switzerland to Sarajevo just as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, in The Hague, was delivering the verdict in the seven-year trial of Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb war leader charged with two counts of genocide, five counts of crimes against humanity, and four counts of violations of laws or customs of war. I knew that every Sarajevan was waiting to hear the judgment upon Karadžić, the man who had orchestrated the brutal siege of the city, which had lasted longer than any other in modern history.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Bosnia’s Unending War
This War of Mine and the New Combat Aesthetic
Takes: Sarajevo, Twenty Years Ago

Campaign Trade Wars

The loud, often incoherent debate about foreign trade hit a new volume level this week as the Presidential campaign arrived in Wisconsin for the April 5th primary there. “Debate” may not even be the right word, since four of the five remaining candidates agree on the main issue now hanging in the balance, which is the vast, twelve-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement—they oppose it. Governor John Kasich is the exception, but his views on any topic beyond how long he’ll remain on his delegate-math-challenged quest barely register at this point.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Hillary Clinton, Live at the Apollo
Donald and Melania and Heidi and Ted
The Lost Generation of the 2016 Campaign

The U.F.C. Takes Manhattan

“Some kind of champion just walked by.” It was a rainy Monday morning in the midtown studios of Sirius Satellite Radio, and two women were sizing up the entourage that had just passed them in the hallway: Miesha Tate, who is in fact the bantamweight champion of the U.F.C., accompanied by a publicist and her father and, most important, her championship belt, which is roughly as big and as shiny as the grille of a luxury sedan. She was there to appear on a talk show hosted by Jenny McCarthy, who introduced her guest by telling her listeners, “I am so excited right now—I have a ladyboner!”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Was Ronda Rousey Thinking?

The Collapse of Dilma Rousseff, the Richard Nixon of Brazil

Richard Nixon was reëlected overwhelmingly in November, 1972, and resigned in August, 1974. Dilma Rousseff, the President of Brazil, looks to be on about the same schedule: reëlected (not overwhelmingly) in October, 2014, and in such deep peril a year and a half later that it seems unlikely that she will finish her term. This week, the largest party in her governing coalition, the Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, or Democratic Movement Party, voted to leave the government, which is the most severe in what must seem to her a never-ending series of blows.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Buddy System
Movie of the Week: “Antonio das Mortes”
Can Nigeria’s New Government Overcome Its Old Corruption?

Lessons from Apple vs. the F.B.I.

It’s welcome news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has dropped its legal effort to force Apple to help it create a method of accessing data on a locked iPhone 5C used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the perpetrators of the massacre that took place in December in San Bernardino. Not that the Bureau, which ultimately found another means of getting into the phone, didn’t have a legitimate interest in knowing what was on the phone: only an ardent libertarian would argue otherwise. But the case raised a number of important issues and conflicting interests that judges alone can’t be, and shouldn’t be, expected to resolve.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, March 22nd
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, February 25th
The Dangerous All Writs Act Precedent in the Apple Encryption Case