George Packer's Blog, page 242
March 11, 2016
G.O.P. Debate: The “Never Trump” Movement Gives Up
At last night’s Republican debate, in Miami, the campaign to stop Donald Trump from within the Party appeared to be all but over. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, appeared onstage before the debate to reassure the audience that “this Party is going to support the nominee—whoever that is—one hundred per cent.” During the main event, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz seemed to have parachuted in from an earlier moment in the campaign, when the stakes were low and the policy discussions were earnest. “I cannot believe how civil it’s been up here,” Trump observed midway through. “Be smart and unify,” he said in his closing statement. Trump is trying to seem more Presidential. The Party is trying to find a way to live with him.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Mark Singer on the Perils of Profiling Donald Trump
Daily Cartoon: Friday, March 11th
Hillary Clinton’s Ordeal Continues at the Democratic Debate
March 10, 2016
Nadiya Savchenko Gives Russia the Finger
On Wednesday, after Nadiya Savchenko blamed the Russian court for her own death, she climbed up on the wooden bench inside the cage in which she is being kept and showed her middle finger to the judicial bench. It was remarkable that she was able to do this, considering that she had had nothing to eat or drink in five days.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Comment from the March 7, 2016, Issue
A Moment for Hope in Syria
Chechnya’s ISIS Problem
The Fear of Water in Flint
The story of the poisoning of the water in Flint, Michigan, has become a dark fable about government negligence, woeful infrastructure, and the hubris of public officials. In April, 2014, the city switched its municipal water source from Detroit’s system to the infamously polluted Flint River, and neglected to add chemicals that would prevent lead from leaching from the city’s pipes into the water. We know now that the water was severely contaminated with lead and bacteria, but, for months, officials reassured residents that the water was safe and were dismissive of evidence to the contrary.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Hillary Clinton’s Nineties Dance at the Flint Debate
Flint and the Long Struggle Against Lead Poisoning
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, January 21st
Hillary Clinton’s Ordeal Continues at the Democratic Debate
After suffering a shocking loss to Bernie Sanders in Michigan on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton didn’t get much relief at the latest Democratic debate, which was held in Miami last night. In fact, the event turned into something of an ordeal for the front-runner. The result in Michigan framed the debate, which was organized by the Spanish-language network Univision, the Washington Post, and Facebook. Clinton was asked tough questions, and her opponent, who was clearly revelling in the moment, displayed a bit of swagger.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, March 9th
Populist Triumph: Big Wins for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, March 8th
March 9, 2016
The Nuns Who Love Chris Mullin
On a Saturday in early February, the St. John’s men’s basketball team hosted the Butler Bulldogs, a Big East rival. It had snowed much of the morning, but Carnesecca Arena was packed to the rafters; among those in attendance was Lou Carnesecca, the gym’s namesake, a onetime head coach at St. John’s and a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame. Carnesecca spent the first half passing around a worn glamour shot of the team’s current coach, Chris Mullin, who played for Carnesecca at St. John’s before going to the N.B.A. Mullin became an All-Star for the Golden State Warriors and earned a spot on the famous 1992 U.S. Olympic Dream Team; he’s in the Hall of Fame, too. Among the fans that Carnesecca passed Mullin’s photo to were a pair of nuns, sitting, in their habits, just a few rows in front of the former coach. Sister Mary Mercedes and Sister Mary Terence—or Merce and Kathryn, as the thirty or so Mullin family members in the crowd called them—hadn’t been to St. John’s since 1985. They were back for the same reason they attended then: to support Chris. When he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, in 2011, he invited both women to the ceremony, and even mentioned them during his speech: “At my age, and you’ve still got two ninety-year-old nuns praying for you, you know life is very good,” he said.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:The Politics of Slam-Dunking
Slams I’d Jam in the N.B.A. Dunk Contest if They’d Let Me Participate
Roots and Rot: Dodging the Blame for Donald Trump
Confession being good for the soul, it is always a good thing to offer a confession for a bad part of one’s past. It is aggravating, though, if, having written a confession, you then go around insisting that everybody else sign it, too. The wiser and most honest conservatives among us have been acknowledging, in the past few weeks, that the ascent of Donald Trump is a huge and historic mistake—but they also want to insist that he’s not just their huge historic mistake. They’ve been passing the blame around. Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal has written, rather movingly, of how Trump’s ascent seems alarmingly to affirm bad things that liberals have said about Republican racial attitudes in the past, with the strong implication that this was, until this very moment, unfair—without stopping to ask how different things might be if the Journal’s editorial page had, in 2012, really condemned Romney’s embrace of Trump at the height of his most rancid “birtherism.”
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:G.O.P. Debate Yoga
No One Here Can Save the G.O.P.
The Clothespin Campaign: A French History Lesson For Anti-Trump Republicans
Is Passive Investment Actively Hurting the Economy?
If you have so much as tiptoed into the arena of personal finance over the past few decades, you will have heard about the virtues of passive investing. The argument goes like this: the stock market will outperform other investments over the long term, yet no individual is in a position to outsmart the market as a whole. So the best way to reap the rewards of investing in stocks with minimal risk is to put your money in a fund that tracks the performance of some broad, indexed measure of the market, such as the S. & P. 500. If you have an I.R.A. or a 401(k), there is a reasonably good chance that some of your money is invested this way; low management fees make index funds an attractive option.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Are We Already in a Bear Market?
Ted Cruz’s Goldman Sachs Problem
The Dubious Logic of Stock-Market Circuit Breakers
Can Tulsi Gabbard Swing Hawaiian Voters to Sanders?
It’s hard to tell this month in Honolulu that a Presidential election is happening. The only evidence of the upcoming Democratic caucuses, on March 26th, is near the University of Hawaii and other spots, where, at rush hour, young people and a few retirees stand at intersections, grinning and waving signs for “Bernie 2016” to get drivers’ attention. Since the nineteen-twenties, Hawaii has banned billboards and other forms of outdoor advertising. Legend has it that, in 1968, Charles Campbell, a schoolteacher who was running for Honolulu’s city council, made a sign and waved it on the main street of town. The rest is history. Volunteers are taught to smile and to acknowledge drivers who honk by waving or flashing the shaka—a fist with thumb and little finger extended.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Populist Triumph: Big Wins for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump
A Bloomberg Presidential Bid Was Always a Pipe Dream
Crying Trump
Populist Triumph: Big Wins for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump
In an election year that has already shattered many received wisdoms, add another one to the scrap heap: the idea that the Democratic and Republican Party establishments were finally getting a handle on the popular insurgencies that have shaken up their parties.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Can Tulsi Gabbard Swing Hawaiian Voters to Sanders?
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, March 9th
A Bloomberg Presidential Bid Was Always a Pipe Dream
March 8, 2016
The Bride Wore Green: What a Wedding Says about Iran’s Future
Wearing a flowing green gown and a string of pearls that hung, flapper-style, below her waist, Narges Mousavi was married Friday, in Tehran. The bride, a painter, was born into the revolutionary élite. Her father, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was Iran’s Prime Minister for eight years. In the eighties, he led the new Islamic Republic through a grisly eight-year war with Iraq at a time when the world sided largely with Saddam Hussein, and in 2009 he ran for the Presidency. The bride’s mother is Zahra Rahnavard, a sculptor and the Islamic Republic’s first female university chancellor. During her husband’s campaign, the Iranian media compared Rahnavard’s lively appearances to Michelle Obama’s.
See the rest of the story at newyorker.com
Related:Iran’s Voters Sent a Message to the Hard-Liners
How to Vote in Iran
Iran’s Technicolor Elections
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