George Packer's Blog, page 66

Gogol’s “Dead Souls” Should Be on Trump’s Summer Reading List

Donald Trump may not realize it, but he has adopted the strategy that was recommended to Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, the shady protagonist of Nikolai Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” whose lawyer (in the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) advises him that “as soon as you see that the case is reaching a denouement and can conveniently be resolved, make sure—not really to justify and defend yourself—no, but simply to confuse things by introducing new and even unrelated issues.” The aim is “to confuse, to confuse, nothing more . . . to introduce into the case some other, unrelated circumstances that will entangle other people in it, to make it complicated.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why So Many Republicans Still Grovel to Trump
Is Trump Now a Subject of the Mueller Investigation?
A Lawsuit Attacks the Marketing of the Presidency

China and the Closing of the Ivory Trade

On the last day of March, the State Forestry Administration, the Chinese agency that monitors the trade in elephant ivory, closed sixty-seven ivory factories and retail outlets across the country. This was the first phase of a larger plan—announced by the government of China, without fanfare, on December 30, 2016—to end the legal trade of elephant ivory within the nation altogether and thus to close the world’s largest elephant-ivory market. (By some estimates, China accounts for seventy per cent of the market for illegal ivory poached in Africa.) Under the government’s plan, the remaining ivory factories and outlets will be shuttered by the end of 2017.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Why More Troops Won’t Help Afghanistan
The War on Wildlife and Its Protectors
A Win in the Ground War Against Elephant Poachers in Africa

The Stanley Cup and the Loneliness of the Mistaken Referee

A little more than a minute into the second period of Sunday night’s Stanley Cup Finals game between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Nashville Predators, the Predators’ Colton Sissons scored what appeared to be the first goal of the game, with a sprawling flick that sent the puck past the Penguins’ goalie, Matt Murray. Yet just as Sissons jumped up to celebrate, he was greeted by the raised arms of the referee, indicating that the ref had blown his whistle before the puck had gone into the net, calling the play dead. Nashville’s home crowd was not pleased; on NBC’s broadcast of the game, the microphone picked up the lone voice of a single fan, speaking for all: “Are you fucking serious?” When the ref, after a brief huddle with his colleagues, skated to near-center ice to brave the crowd’s wrath with an explanation over the P.A. system—“The whistle had gone; we have no goal”—he was met with what sounded less like booing than like the cry of a very large, wounded animal.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What If We Had Perfect Robot Referees?
The N.F.L. Dictatorship
The Refs Strike Again

Rafael Nadal’s Resurgence at the French Open

Confidence is crucial for any athlete, but especially a tennis player. After all, he or she has no one else to turn to. The place to look is always inward. It’s existential. Tennis players call it belief, and they talk about it, mostly to themselves, all the time.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
At the French Open, Fearlessness Wins
Maria Sharapova Is Turned Away by the French Open
Wawrinka, Kerber, and Two Highly Rivalrous U.S. Open Finals

Mosul’s Library Without Books

I could smell the acrid soot a block away. The library at the University of Mosul, among the finest in the Middle East, once had a million books, historic maps, and old manuscripts. Some dated back centuries, even a millennium, Mohammed Jasim, the library’s director, told me. Among its prize acquisitions was a Quran from the ninth century, although the library also housed thousands of twenty-first-century volumes on science, philosophy, law, world history, literature, and the arts. Six hundred thousand books were in Arabic; many of the rest were in English. During the thirty-two months that the Islamic State ruled the city, the university campus, on tree-lined grounds near the Tigris River, was gradually closed down and then torched. Quite intentionally, the library was hardest hit. ISIS sought to kill the ideas within its walls—or at least the access to them.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Sebastian Junger’s New Documentary About Syria
Terror Strikes Tehran
Why More Troops Won’t Help Afghanistan

At the French Open, Fearlessness Wins

In the women’s final of the French Open on Saturday, Jelena Ostapenko was fearless. The word was inescapable. It was repeated on television, on Twitter, in the headlines that announced her 4–6, 6–4, 6–3 win over Simona Halep. It was felt in the singe of every forehand she fired, heard in every shrieking grunt, seen in every backhand return she ripped—whether for a winner or an error. It was evident in the way that she broke Halep’s serve at love to start the match, in the way she kept gunning her shots when she was down a set, 0–3 in the second, and facing three break points. She went for a winner with every shot.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Rafael Nadal’s Resurgence at the French Open
Maria Sharapova Is Turned Away by the French Open
The French Open, Novak Djokovic, and the End of the Machine Age in Tennis

A Graveyard, and a Caretaker, for Victims of the Pulse Massacre

Don Price’s workday begins in the old section of Greenwood Cemetery in Orlando. At 9:30 A.M., he pulls his red Dodge Ram pickup through the gates and drives counterclockwise along the roads that wind past the gravestones of nineteenth-century pioneers, war heroes, and former mayors. Networks of live oak branches loom overhead, Spanish moss hanging off the limbs like curly white hair. Price, the cemetery’s caretaker, looks through the windshield, scanning for anything that appears out of place. The city-owned property covers a hundred acres, and more than seventy thousand bodies are buried within, including many of Orlando’s luminaries. After about twenty minutes, Price completes his rounds at the cemetery’s northwest corner, where the bodies of four young men are grouped together in a special plot. The “kids,” he calls them. They were among the forty-nine people killed a year ago in the mass shooting at the Pulse night club.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
After the Orlando Shooting, the Changed Lives of Gay Latinos
Love Jihad: Orlando and Gay Muslims
Hate, Terror, and Guns in Orlando

A C.S.A. for Books

Mariah Hughs and her husband, Nick Sichterman, founded Blue Hill Books in 1986. It sits on Pleasant Street, in Blue Hill, Maine, a coastal town with a population that swells during the warmer months and thins out again each winter, reduced to its cast of fewer than three thousand year-round residents. This past winter, in the midst of that slow season, Hughs and Sichterman retired, leaving the bookstore in the hands of Samantha Haskell, who had been their full-time employee since 2010. Haskell had working capital to survive the first year, but, in order to maintain the breadth of the store’s inventory, she needed to raise additional funds. Rather than compromise the shelves, she looked to local farms for inspiration, devising a plan modelled after “community-supported agriculture,” commonly referred to by its initials, C.S.A. Blue Hill Books would become a community-supported bookseller: a C.S.B.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Amazon’s Brick-and-Mortar Bookstores Are Not Built for People Who Actually Read
A Few Words About That Ten-Million-Dollar Serial Comma
Trump, L. L. Bean, and the Peculiar Politics of Maine

The Strange Secret History of Operation Goldfinger

In September of 1965, Joe Barr, a Treasury Department official with a long history in government, agreed to meet with a group of members of Congress from Western states. He knew what to expect. Earlier that year, he had met with the same group, and endured its ire over the Treasury’s reluctance to help the American gold industry. After the Second World War, world leaders had met at Bretton Woods, in New Hampshire, and, as part of an agreement on an international monetary system, had fixed the price of gold at thirty-five dollars an ounce. This had, predictably, depressed the U.S. mining industry, even as the demand for private gold shot up. The more easily obtained sources of gold had been depleted over the years, while harder-to-reach sources became more difficult to mine profitably, given the static price. Foreign competition—chiefly from Canada and South Africa, where mines were less depleted and labor costs were lower—was far more intense by 1960 than it had been after the war, when the price of gold was set. The United States was a distant third in gold production. Rather than attempt to compete, many mines simply shut down.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

How a Russian Journalist Exposed the Anti-Gay Crackdown in Chechnya

This spring, news of a campaign of repression against gay men in Chechnya, a republic in Russia’s North Caucasus, began to appear in the United States and Europe. Dozens of men suspected of being gay were reportedly being held in secret prisons; many had been tortured, and several had died. Fifty members of Congress signed a letter calling on Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to raise the issue of violence against gay men with Russian officials. The State Department released a statement saying that it was “increasingly concerned” about the situation and that it “categorically” condemned the “persecution of individuals based on their sexual orientation,” but to date neither Tillerson nor Donald Trump has spoken publicly about the issue. Other foreign leaders have not been so circumspect. Last month, in a meeting in Moscow, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to exert his influence to “insure that minorities’ rights are protected.” On May 29th, at a testy joint press conference in Paris, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, challenged Putin on the need to protect Chechnya’s gay community, saying, “I will be constantly vigilant on these issues.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The White House Can’t Decide How to Attack James Comey
Comey’s Revenge: Measuring Obstruction
James Comey’s Remarkable Story About Donald Trump