George Packer's Blog, page 236

On the American Front Line Against ISIS

America’s front line facing the Islamic State is more than two thousand miles from Brussels, as the crow flies, and then another ninety minutes by country road from the Kurdish capital of Erbil, in northern Iraq. The trip to Camp Swift, in Makhmour, the forward U.S. base, can be deceptively pastoral. I was slowed by a flock of sheep and goats crossing the road to a grassy plain sprinkled with budding yellow wildflowers. A curly-haired eighteen-year-old sheepherder, Mustafa Maghdid, picked up a young lamb to show me. A woolly white ram played at his feet. Millions of Iraqis fled as ISIS blitzed through the north, in 2014, but a determined few have been reluctant to surrender their herds or small farms. Tales of ISIS’s plunder are rampant. There is little left, according to the war grapevine, for those who may one day want to return.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Marcel Broodthaers’s Brussels, and Mine
Chechnya’s ISIS Problem
One of Africa’s Biggest Dams Is Falling Apart

A Crisis for Minorities in Pakistan

When the bomb went off in Lahore’s Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park, on Sunday, families were settled into the lull of Easter celebrations. Picnics were out and children were scattered across the playground. The suicide bomber walked purposefully to the swings before blowing himself up, along with the kids around him. More than seventy people died in the attack, at least twenty-nine of them children, and more than three hundred people were wounded. One reporter who arrived at the scene told me that victims were rushed to the hospital in ambulances, taxis, private cars, and rickshaws, while surviving children were rounded up as security guards tried to find their families.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Powerful Documentary About Pakistan’s Honor Killings
Pakistan’s Monster
The Pakistani Dystopia

Donald and Melania and Heidi and Ted

“He started it!” Donald Trump said Sunday, on “This Week.” Those words have become a common wail in the dystopian playground free-for-all that is today’s G.O.P., but in this case Trump was explaining how he had come to tweet that he would “spill the beans” about Ted Cruz’s wife, Heidi, and then retweeted a post arguing that there was no need for him to do so, apparently because the tweeter thought that Heidi didn’t look as pretty in a certain photograph as Trump’s wife, Melania. Technically speaking, though, Cruz didn’t start this, though he has taken it in unpleasant directions. Nor, really, did Make America Awesome, the anti-Trump super PAC that, before the Utah caucuses, put out a Facebook ad directed at Mormon women featuring an old photo of Melania Trump posing discreetly nude (much of her body is concealed), on a fur throw. The caption reads, “Meet Melania Trump. Your next First Lady. Or, you could support Ted Cruz on Tuesday.” The person who started it, really, was Barbara Walters—though in a way she had also showed Trump how to end it immediately, if he’d wanted to.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Man Behind the Trump Piñata
The Lost Generation of the 2016 Campaign
Comment from the April 4, 2016, Issue

The Lost Generation of the 2016 Campaign

If you look back several months, you might regret the hours you spent watching the Presidential debates, but then, some might feel that way about binge-watching a series on Netflix: the debates were irresistible. At the same time, one could regret that the inspired idea by someone at Fox News, back in February, to stage a debate—mano a mano, one might say—between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders was never realized. Both men started out as the unlikeliest candidates of this election cycle, and both, at the very least, will be at the center of things at this summer’s political conventions; Sanders’s impressive Western-state victories on Saturday were reminders of his tenacity and appeal. A Trump-Sanders debate might not have settled much, but it would have been instructive to watch Trump, the developer-capitalist, and Sanders, the Vermont senator and democratic socialist, clarify what they stand for, how they stand apart, and even how they might agree. (For instance, both seem to favor spending the billions used to fight Mideast wars to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure.) But, after both candidates said that they would participate, Trump backed out, citing the old, reliable “scheduling conflicts” excuse.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Media Unimpressed as Sanders Barely Gets Seventy Per Cent of Vote
Daily Cartoon: Monday, March 28th
Comment from the April 4, 2016, Issue

North Carolina and the Gay-Rights Backlash

Last December, the Empire State Pride Agenda, New York’s leading L.G.B.T.-rights organization, did something almost unheard of. After twenty-five years of work, it declared victory and closed. “We ran out of causes, and donors,” one of its leaders recently told me. But not everyone in the gay-rights community saw things that way. At about the same time that the Pride Agenda decided to cease operations, Kate Kendell, the executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, told Time, “We are just seeing the beginning on the backlash [against L.G.B.T. rights]. It will get worse before it gets better.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Forgotten Ones: Queer and Trans Lives in the Prison System
Who’s Afraid of Gender-Neutral Bathrooms?
Fighting Environmental Racism in North Carolina

Dave Roberts and the Importance of Baseball’s Middle Managers

Farhan Zaidi, a thirty-nine-year-old who was born in Canada to Pakistani parents and grew up mostly in the Philippines, holds a Ph.D. in behavioral economics from the University of California at Berkeley. While he was working on that degree, he read Michael Lewis’s book “Moneyball,” published in 2003, about the Oakland A’s and their maverick general manager, Billy Beane, and his use of statistical analysis. Zaidi decided to apply for a job with the franchise. He eventually became an assistant to Beane, who, in 2011, told me he was proud that a baseball team could attract that kind of brain power. Zaidi “could just as easily be creating his own startup or working for Google or working for Apple,” Beane said then. “Instead, he chooses to work here.” In 2014, Zaidi was hired away by the Los Angeles Dodgers—a franchise, like the A’s, known for its commitment to sophisticated analytics—who made him their G.M.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Noah Syndergaard and the Very Confident New York Mets
David Ortiz Begins His Last Slow Trot
Living la Vida Loca in Japan

Comment from the April 4, 2016, Issue

In “Bad Choices,” Amy Davidson writes about the prevalence of demagoguery in discussions by Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, and G.O.P. leaders about the recent terrorist attacks in Brussels, Belgium.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Can Merrick Garland Kill the Filibuster?
The Calculated Populism of Rob Ford
A Walk in Rome in the Days of Trump

Can Bernie Sanders Really Win the Nomination?

“Don’t let anyone tell you we can’t win the nomination, or win the general election,” Bernie Sanders told a huge crowd in Madison, Wisconsin, on Saturday evening. “We’re going to do both of those things.” The Vermont senator’s optimism was understandable, as was the enthusiasm of his supporters, who repeatedly interrupted him with chants of “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!,” and “We believe that we can win!”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Garry Shandling’s Benevolent Spirit
What Bernie Sanders Has Achieved
The Primaries: The Story So Far

Why Are Educators Learning How to Interrogate Their Students?

About a year and a half ago, Jessica Schneider was handed a flyer by one of her colleagues in the child-advocacy community. It advertised a training session, offered under the auspices of the Illinois Principals Association (I.P.A.), in how to interrogate students. Specifically, teachers and school administrators would be taught an abbreviated version of the Reid Technique, which is used across the country by police officers, private-security personnel, insurance-fraud investigators, and other people for whom getting at the truth is part of the job. Schneider, who is a staff attorney at the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, was alarmed. She knew that some psychologists and jurists have characterized the technique as coercive and liable to produce false confessions—especially when used with juveniles, who are highly suggestible. When she expressed her concerns to Brian Schwartz, the I.P.A.’s general counsel, he said that the association had been offering Reid training for many years and found it both popular and benign. To prove it, he invited Schneider to attend a session in January of 2015.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
James Ridgeway’s Solitary Reporting
Black Wounds Matter
The Case Against Cash Bail

Can Merrick Garland Kill the Filibuster?

The nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court has already devolved into a political war of attrition. In the week since President Barack Obama named Garland, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in February, the vast majority of Senate Republicans have stood by the pledge of their leader, Mitch McConnell, that Garland will be denied a hearing or a vote. A handful of Republican senators have deigned to meet with Garland, but the prospect of a hearing or a vote, let alone a confirmation, seems remote indeed.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Comment from the March 28, 2016, Issue
Donald Trump and the Super Tuesday II View from Mar-a-Lago
Hillary Clinton’s Ordeal Continues at the Democratic Debate