George Packer's Blog, page 239

Trump and the Two Underwoods: A Tale of Contested Conventions

“Alabama—twenty-four votes for Underwood!” That declaration, despite the Underwood name, is not from “House of Cards” but from the wildly contested 1924 Democratic Convention, at Madison Square Garden. The Underwood in question was not Francis (or Claire) but Oscar. He was one of many, many candidates whose name was put to a vote, and, though he was well behind the front-runners—Governor Al Smith, of New York, and the Californian William McAdoo—he was one of the few to stay in until the end. Each roll call began with Alabama, and the delegation’s spokesman, Governor W. W. Brandon, gained notoriety for his booming drawl. At first, it seemed like a charming regionalism. But, as ballot after ballot ended in deadlock, the cry (“Al-aaa-ba-maaa!”) became a signal that an august party ritual had devolved into political self-parody. There were a hundred and three ballots before a nominee was chosen.

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Related:
What Bernie Sanders Has Achieved
How Should the Media Cover Donald Trump?
Did the Violence at a Trump Rally Help Hillary Clinton?

Tanner Hall and the Athlete’s Case for Cannabis

In February, Tanner Hall, one of the greatest freestyle skiers of all time—he won seven X Games gold medals and four silver in the Big Air, SlopeStyle, and Superpipe events between 2001 and 2009—signed a deal with a Denver-based cannabis-accessories company called Black Rock Originals. Hall, who is now thirty-two and based in northern California, near Lake Tahoe, helped the company create the Skiboss Collection, which consists of rolling papers, a cheese-grater-like card for grinding nuggets on the go, and a lighter, all tucked inside a travel-friendly pouch.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Shakespeare’s Lost Weed Sonnets
What Are We Smoking?
Delusional Confidence? A Report from the Marijuana Investor Summit

The Catholic Movement Against Capital Punishment

On February 21st, as Mario Marazziti prepared Sunday lunch at his apartment in Trastevere, he had the television on, turned to Rai Vaticano, the Italian state channel devoted to coverage of the Catholic Church. It showed an image of Pope Francis in the window of the papal apartments overlooking St. Peter’s Square. There—a fifteen-minute walk from Trastevere, via the old pilgrim road—Francis was leading the faithful in a set of prayers known as the Angelus. The Pope usually speaks briefly when the prayers are finished, and, on this Sunday, Francis called for a global moratorium on the death penalty, as part of the Year of Mercy he initiated last fall.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
From Trump to Zika: Pope Francis’s Eventful Plane Ride
Copy-Editing Trump
The Radical Meaning of Pope Francis’s Visit to Juárez

An Awkward Farewell to Kobe Bryant

I was in Los Angeles trying to make up for lost time. On a March evening, I hung around the back area of the Staples Center, where the walls are covered floor-to-ceiling with a cherry-colored wood composite, way past the wide, purple-painted cinder-block hallways with purple-uniformed event staff flitting in and out of side doors. The game, against the New York Knicks, had ended twenty minutes before. For the fifty-third time this season, the Lakers had lost. They’ve won only fourteen games. The weather, as usual, was fine. There was a lightness, a buoyancy, that felt strange for a team this bad. Maybe sixteen championship seasons does that. Or perhaps it’s because the players and fans and team employees all know that the team is on sabbatical. Kobe Bryant is retiring, and this season is dedicated to giving him a stage from which the world of basketball can say goodbye.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
How the Jump Shot Brought Individualism to Basketball
The Nuns Who Love Chris Mullin
The Politics of Slam-Dunking

What Bernie Sanders Has Achieved

As he has been for most of the past year, Bernie Sanders is on the road. On Thursday, he was scheduled to hold a town-hall meeting at the Twin Arrows Casino, east of Flagstaff, Arizona. You read that right: the seventy-four-year-old Vermont senator was set to issue his trademark call for a “political revolution” and to demand more income and wealth redistribution at a capitalist mecca in one of the most conservative states in the Union.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
How Should the Media Cover Donald Trump?
Did the Violence at a Trump Rally Help Hillary Clinton?
John Kasich, Mainstream Republicans’ Last Hope

Guantánamo: From Prison to Marine Conservation Peace Park?

Even before it became home to an infamous detention camp, the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, in southeastern Cuba, had what might generously be called a troubling history. The United States secured the rights to the base following the Spanish-American War, as part of the agreement that—nominally, at least—granted independence to Cuba in 1903. Thirty years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt altered the terms of this agreement, but the U.S. still held onto Guantánamo. When Fidel Castro came to power, in 1959, he stopped cashing the rent checks from the Treasury Department and demanded—and kept demanding—that the land be returned. But the U.S. continued to send the checks, and, more to the point, to hold onto the base. (The rent for Guantánamo—four thousand and eighty-five dollars a year—hasn’t risen since 1938; as the base occupies some forty-five square miles, this comes to an annual payment, or nonpayment, of about fourteen cents an acre.) Even as the U.S. and Cuba move toward restoring diplomatic relations, the White House insists it will not negotiate the status of Guantánamo. For its part, Cuba maintains that until the U.S gives up the base, full normalization is impossible.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Obama’s Flawed Plan to Close Guantánamo
Obama Signs Executive Order Relocating Congress to Guantánamo
The Cuban Migrant Crisis

China’s New Age of Economic Anxiety

At China’s most important political forum of the year—a joint session of the National People’s Congress and the People’s Political Consultative Conference, which concluded yesterday—the talk has been heavy on economics. And for good reason. Since a spectacular plunge in the Shanghai Stock Exchange last June, China’s economy, the world’s second largest after that of the United States, has sunk into its steepest slowdown in a quarter century. “Domestically, problems and risks that have been building up over the years are becoming more evident,” Premier Li Keqiang, the nation’s top economic official, told the three thousand delegates sombrely gathered at the People’s Great Hall last Saturday. This was a departure from the regime’s usual rote assurances that the economy will continue to grow at a strong pace. Acknowledging an economic downturn may be uncomfortable for an authoritarian regime that has long prided itself on its stewardship of the socialist economic engine. But, for a generation of Chinese reared on the rhetoric of a relentless and freewheeling economic ascent, it is terrifying.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why Donald Trump Is Wrong About Manufacturing Jobs and China
Is Passive Investment Actively Hurting the Economy?
Why Did China Kidnap Its Provocateurs?

Did the Violence at a Trump Rally Help Hillary Clinton?

In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s big wins on Tuesday—she finished ahead of Bernie Sanders in Florida, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio—I’ve heard several people suggest that the violence at a Donald Trump rally in Chicago, last Friday, may have helped her.* “I think some Democrats got scared,” a Sanders supporter told me. “They saw what could happen if Trump is elected, and they said we need someone mainstream and reliable to stop him.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Bernie Sanders Has Achieved
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, March 17th
How Should the Media Cover Donald Trump?

How Hillary Clinton Triumphed on Tuesday

In the wake of Hillary Clinton’s big wins on Tuesday—she finished ahead of Bernie Sanders in Florida, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio—I’ve heard several people suggest that the violence at a Donald Trump rally in Chicago, last Friday, may have helped her. “I think some Democrats got scared,” a Sanders supporter told me. “They saw what could happen if Trump is elected, and they said we need someone mainstream and reliable to stop him.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
John Kasich, Mainstream Republicans’ Last Hope
U.S. Becomes Laughingstock of World for Something Other Than Gun Laws
Donald Trump and the Super Tuesday II View from Mar-a-Lago

John Kasich, Mainstream Republicans’ Last Hope

The Republican voters in Ohio who made up their minds in the last days of the election turned to John Kasich on Tuesday, as they had in Michigan and New Hampshire, and not to Marco Rubio. The recent interest in the Ohio governor, who has now outlasted the more obviously formidable candidacies of Rubio, Chris Christie, and Jeb Bush to become the last traditional Republican standing in the race, has seemed more about his manner than his policies, a campaign that emphasizes “pulling us together,” as Kasich put it last night. On the eve of Tuesday’s contests, knowing that his own candidacy was near its end, Rubio urged his remaining supporters in Ohio, where his polling numbers were meagre, to back Kasich, in the hopes of denying Donald Trump a victory there. Perhaps he hoped that Kasich would return the gesture in Florida, but he did not. It wouldn’t have mattered. Trump won forty-six per cent of Florida’s votes, and all of its delegates; Rubio lost his home state by nearly twenty points. Victory wasn’t in “God’s plan,” Rubio said last night, as he announced the suspension of his campaign.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
How Hillary Clinton Triumphed on Tuesday
U.S. Becomes Laughingstock of World for Something Other Than Gun Laws
Donald Trump and the Super Tuesday II View from Mar-a-Lago