George Packer's Blog, page 238

Terror in Brussels

Shortly after eight o’clock this morning, hundreds of travellers started running down a ramp outside Brussels Airport, wheeled baggage trailing behind them. Some glanced back in disbelief toward a wall of shattered glass, where smoke was seeping out. Two suicide bombers had just detonated inside the departures hall.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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American Presidential Campaigns in the Age of Terror
Salah Abdeslam, Captured in Brussels
Obama’s Flawed Plan to Close Guantánamo

Obama and Raúl Castro’s Awkward Embrace in Cuba

The cognitive dissonance of what is taking place in Cuba cannot be understated. On Monday, President Barack Obama and his delegation, which includes Secretary of State John Kerry and national-security adviser Susan Rice, stood at attention in Havana’s Revolution Square as the Cuban military band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with enormous murals of Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos behind them. Obama laid a wreath at the foot of the square’s memorial to José Martí, the nineteenth-century poet and national hero who has long been considered the “apostle” of Cuban independence. Later, presiding over an American-style town-hall meeting with the reporter Soledad O’Brien at a Havana microbrewery, the President asked questions and dispensed advice to new Cuban entrepreneurs and introduced them to Brian Chesky, the youthful co-founder of Airbnb, getting him to boast, for the audience’s edification, that his eight-year-old Internet-based company was valued at an astonishing twenty-five billion dollars. The message was clear: the future is yours.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Why the Turnout in November Should Help Hillary Clinton

Should Democrats be worried that their voters are less energized than the G.O.P.’s are this primary season? In a piece earlier this month headlined “Beneath Hillary Clinton’s Super Tuesday Wins, Signs of Turnout Trouble,” the New York Times noted that many fewer Democrats had participated in primaries this year than in 2008, especially throughout the South. The conservative Washington Times, meanwhile, has been sounding this theme since the start of primary season, with headlines like “Donald Trump Drives GOP’s Record Turnout; Democrats Lack Enthusiasm.” And, according to the Pew Research Center, while seventeen per cent of eligible Republican voters came out to the polls in the first twelve primaries, just under twelve per cent of Democrats did. (You can pause for a moment to take in how low both of those percentages are.) Moreover, Trump’s chest-thumping nativism has brought to the polls people who don’t usually bother with them, notably white men with a high-school degree or less, the “poorly educated,” whom Trump professes to love. Their presence has certainly made itself felt in the Republican primaries. And on the other side are the Bernie Sanders diehards—not large in number, surely, but there—who might actually stay home in November rather than cast a vote for Clinton.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Daily Cartoon: Monday, March 21st
Me Gusta Trump: Portrait of a Hispanic Trump Voter

The Accidental Powerlifting World-Record Holder

On July 2, 2015, a video was uploaded to YouTube that began with a teen-age girl in a gym wrapping a weightlifting belt around her waist. Her hair was nested atop her head in a messy bun, and headphones covered her ears. A straight bar with six plates on each side, totalling four hundred and twenty pounds, rested on the ground next to her. She huffed and puffed, paced from one end of the gym to the other, and clapped her hands. Small clouds of chalk wafted from her palms. Then she walked up to the bar, howled, bent down, and lifted the weight to her mid-thigh, in what is called a deadlift. She exhaled, arched her back, and dropped the bar and the plates to the floor. “Yes!” she screamed. “Fucking shit! I did it!”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Accidental Weight-Lifting World-Record Holder

On July 2, 2015, a video was uploaded to YouTube that began with a teen-age girl in a gym wrapping a weight-lifting belt around her waist. Her hair was nested atop her head in a messy bun, and headphones covered her ears. A straight bar with six plates on each side, totalling four hundred and twenty pounds, rested on the ground next to her. She huffed and puffed, paced from one end of the gym to the other, and clapped her hands. Small clouds of chalk wafted from her palms. Then she walked up to the bar, howled, bent down, and lifted the weight to her mid-thigh, in what is called a dead lift. She exhaled, arched her back, and dropped the bar and the plates to the floor. “Yes!” she screamed. “Fucking shit! I did it!”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Most Awesome Female Runner in the World
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Who’s Afraid of Merrick Garland?

There was a brief moment, this weekend, when Governor John Kasich exhibited what passes today for reason in the Republican Party. He wasn’t entirely sensible: asked about Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, he told Chuck Todd, on “Meet the Press,” “I never thought the President should have sent it up”—adopting the position that, somehow, Obama, twice elected and with a year left in his term, had shown unwarranted audacity by doing his job. On “Face the Nation,” Kasich told John Dickerson the same thing, in the same words, adding, “Whoever gets elected President should be in a position to be able to pick who they want.” He meant the 2016 election; 2012 doesn’t count. Still, he did say that the Republican senators “probably ought to all sit down and meet with the guy,” something almost all of them have refused to do. When Dickerson asked if a President Kasich would consider Garland, he said, “Of course we’d think about it.” He also told Todd that the senators should show respect by giving Garland a meeting, and that, in a Kasich Presidency, “maybe he’ll be under consideration for the Supreme Court. I don’t know.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Why the Turnout in November Should Help Hillary Clinton
Me Gusta Trump: Portrait of a Hispanic Trump Voter
Donald Trump, Con Artist?

Comment from the March 28, 2016, Issue

In “Court Politics,” Jeffrey Toobin writes about Republican plans to block President Obama’s Supreme Court Justice nominee, Merrick Garland.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Comment from the March 21, 2016, Issue
Comment from the March 14, 2016, Issue

Me Gusta Trump: Portrait of a Hispanic Trump Voter

John Castillo grew up in Lincoln Heights, the heart of Hispanic Los Angeles, in a tight-knit Mexican-American family. His father’s name was Juan, but his mother decided to name their son John. He attended Cathedral High School, a Lasallian Catholic private school founded in 1925 in East Los Angeles, one of the country’s most populous Latino communities. The red-brick building, which sits on an old burial ground, overlooks downtown Los Angeles. The school’s current population is two-thirds Hispanic, and seventy per cent of its students receive financial aid. Castillo did, too: he had to sweep floors after class to help cover his tuition. Most of his friends were sons of immigrants. Many, he says, became “cholos,” joining local gangs at an early age. “A few of them are doing life in prison,” Castillo says, casually.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Salah Abdeslam, Captured in Brussels

On Friday afternoon in Brussels, heavily armed security personnel wearing balaclavas and full combat gear knocked on the front door of a residence on Rue de Quatre Vents, in the heart of the neighborhood of Molenbeek. To the locals, many of whom are of Moroccan descent, it was a painfully familiar scene. Several terrorist attacks—dating at least as far back as the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, in 2001—have had connections to Molenbeek. Shortly after the attacks in Paris on November 13th, which left a hundred and thirty people dead, the French and Belgian authorities determined that several of the perpetrators had lived in Molenbeek. The neighborhood became the focus of the investigation as well as frequent raids.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Fall and Rise of Onagawa

Five years after the great East Japan earthquake and tsunami, the port of Onagawa has a craft-beer bar, an artisanal coffeehouse, a Spanish-tile factory, and a workshop where electric guitars are carved from local cedar, all laid out along the new Seapal Pier shopping precinct, at the town’s own ground zero. None of these businesses was here before March 11, 2011, when the quake sent a wave almost fifty feet high through Onagawa Bay and over the waterfront, destroying more than seventy per cent of the town’s buildings and killing about one in twelve of its residents, including more than two hundred and fifty people whose bodies were never recovered. The disaster brought sudden attention to Onagawa, and to other stricken towns and cities along the edge of Miyagi Prefecture, in Japan’s relatively poor Tohoku region—quiet fishing communities made famous by their near-erasure. Onagawa, alone among them, has remade itself as a kind of model village for the reconstruction process: rebuilding by way of rebranding.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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