George Packer's Blog, page 86

Olympic Bidding in the Age of Trump and Le Pen

The bidding process to host the 2024 Summer Olympics is turning out to be a lonely affair. With Budapest pulling out of the competition in February, citing disapproval from Hungarian citizens, only Los Angeles and Paris are left in the running.

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Related:
The Trump Resistance: A Progress Report
Ivanka’s Notes for the Babysitter
Eavesdropping on Roy Cohn and Donald Trump

In Georgia, Jon Ossoff Tries to Vanquish Seventeen Candidates at Once

Two weeks before a special election for Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District seat, which takes place this Tuesday, the thirty-year-old Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff stood on a busy North Atlanta street corner brandishing a lightsaber. His combatant was a giggling eight-year-old boy who didn’t grasp the broader sabering context: soon after Ossoff declared his candidacy to replace Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, in January, an odd attack ad appeared, showing Ossoff, in his Georgetown days, dressed as Han Solo from “Star Wars,” for a spoof film made by Ossoff’s college a-cappella group. Paid for by the Congressional Leadership Fund, the ad was presumably meant to portray Ossoff, who most recently worked as a documentary filmmaker exposing judicial corruption and wartime atrocities, as young, unserious, and . . . a leader in the alliance to restore the Republic? Somehow, the ad did little to dissuade voters from considering the political novice: in the weeks since, he has risen to the head of an eighteen-candidate pack, garnering forty-five per cent of the vote in a poll released this past Friday.

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Jon Ossoff and the Al Jazeera Effect
The Unlikely Liberal Hero Adam Schiff Is Ready to Investigate Trump
Can This Democrat Win the Georgia Sixth?

Revisiting Jackie Robinson’s Major-League Début, Seventy Years Later

On April 15, 1947, Ed Silverman, a reporter for Sports-Week magazine, took the subway from his apartment, on West Twenty-fourth Street in Manhattan, to the Prospect Park stop, in Brooklyn, walked to Empire Boulevard, and crossed the street to Ebbets Field. Silverman, who was born in Jersey City and raised in Queens, was twenty-three years old, and he had been handed a plum assignment from his editor, Marty Berg: cover the Dodgers’ Opening Day. The team had just called up Jackie Robinson, generally recognized to be the first African-American player to make the major leagues. (Although historians have pointed to a couple of players who came before him.) Berg told Silverman that word on the street was there might be riots in the stands if Robinson took the field.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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“Get Out” and the Death of White Racial Innocence
The Steve King Style of American Politics
Ben Carson, Donald Trump, and the Misuse of American History

A Journalist in Exile Awaits Turkey’s Momentous Referendum

One morning last May, Can Dündar, a Turkish journalist, was standing outside an Istanbul courthouse, waiting for a judge to reach a verdict on his guilt or innocence, when a man rushed toward him with a gun. A year earlier, Dündar’s newspaper, Cumhuriyet, a daily favored by Turkey’s secular left, had published video footage of truckloads of weapons being smuggled to Syrian rebels by Turkish state intelligence agents. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose government had denied that it was supplying the rebels, was outraged and vowed that Dündar, then editor-in-chief, would “pay a heavy price.” Dündar was arrested and charged with aiding a terrorist organization and with espionage, among other crimes. “Traitor!” the gunman shouted as he fired two shots in Dündar’s direction. Dündar’s wife, Dilek, along with a member of parliament, grabbed the gunman, and video of the scene shows the three in an odd, lumbering half-embrace until the man is ordered to drop his gun. After the shooting, Dündar looked a bit ruffled but was uncannily composed. “I am fine. I am fine,” he told reporters. “Nobody should worry. Please be calm. There is nothing wrong. My wife jumped on him. So I want to congratulate her.” Glancing at Dilek, he smiled. “Thank you. Thank you.”

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Related:
A Mysterious Case Involving Turkey, Iran, and Rudy Giuliani
A Last Chance for Turkish Democracy
What Mike Flynn Did for Turkey

Eavesdropping on Roy Cohn and Donald Trump

In early March, President Trump sent four tweets accusing his predecessor of wiretapping the phones in Trump Tower in the months before the 2016 election. The tweets were just the latest manifestation of Trump’s preoccupation with eavesdropping and surveillance—one that can be traced back decades. As BuzzFeed’s Aram Roston reported last summer, during the mid-two-thousands, Trump kept a telephone console in his bedroom at his Mar-a-Lago resort, in Palm Beach, that allowed him to listen in on phone calls between his employees and, sometimes, staff and guests. (Trump denied this.) In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Trump allowed Tony Schwartz, his ghostwriter, to listen in on his private phone calls with bankers, lawyers, and developers, as Schwartz wrote “The Art of the Deal.” And, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many of Trump’s private conversations with his late mentor, the lawyer Roy Cohn, were eavesdropped on by Cohn’s longtime switchboard operator and courier, whose activities were later exposed.

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Related:
Steve Bannon’s Nationalist Team Prepares for the Long Game
Trump Drops the Mother of All Bombs on Afghanistan
What Did Rex Tillerson Accomplish in Moscow?

A Mysterious Case Involving Turkey, Iran, and Rudy Giuliani

The mysterious case of Reza Zarrab, a Turkish-Iranian businessman facing federal charges in New York, has grown even stranger over the past couple of weeks.

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Related:
A Journalist in Exile Awaits Turkey’s Momentous Referendum
A Last Chance for Turkish Democracy
What Mike Flynn Did for Turkey

War, Terrorism, and the Christian Exodus from the Middle East

A decade ago, I spent Easter in Damascus. Big chocolate bunnies and baskets of pastel eggs decorated shop windows in the Old City. Both the Catholic and Orthodox Easters were celebrated, and all Syrians were given time off for both three-day holidays on sequential weekends. I stopped in the Umayyad Mosque, which was built in the eighth century and named after the first dynasty to lead the Islamic world. The head of John the Baptist is reputedly buried in a large domed sanctuary—although claims vary—on the mosque’s grounds. Muslims revere John as the Prophet Yahya, the name in Arabic. Because of his birth to a long-barren mother and an aged father, Muslim women who are having trouble getting pregnant come to pray at his tomb. I watched as Christian tourists visiting the shrine mingled with Muslim women.

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The IHOP Years
Savor Renée Fleming in “Der Rosenkavalier,” at the Met
A Journalist in Exile Awaits Turkey’s Momentous Referendum

Steve Bannon’s Nationalist Team Prepares for the Long Game

The news from the West Wing this week is the seeming demise of the Trump Administration’s so-called nationalist faction. It is losing policy battles, and Stephen Bannon, President Trump’s chief strategist and the leading nationalist, is being marginalized. He was recently removed from his position on the National Security Council, an unprecedented role for a political adviser, and many reports suggest that could be a first step toward Bannon being pushed out of the White House altogether. Trump did little to dampen the speculation. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump described Bannon as “a guy who works for me.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Eavesdropping on Roy Cohn and Donald Trump
Trump Drops the Mother of All Bombs on Afghanistan
What Did Rex Tillerson Accomplish in Moscow?

Trump Drops the Mother of All Bombs on Afghanistan

When the so-called Mother of All Bombs was first tested, in 2003, the largest conventional weapon in the United States arsenal set off a mushroom cloud visible for twenty miles. The potential damage from the twenty-two-thousand-pound bomb was so vast that the Pentagon ordered a legal review to insure that the device wouldn’t be deemed an indiscriminate killer under the Law of Armed Conflict, the body of law that regulates behavior during wartime. The MOAB was compared to a small nuclear weapon. It’s so large that no U.S. warplane is big enough to drop it: it has to be offloaded from the rear of a cargo plane, with the help of a parachute.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Eavesdropping on Roy Cohn and Donald Trump
Steve Bannon’s Nationalist Team Prepares for the Long Game
What Did Rex Tillerson Accomplish in Moscow?

Analytics Reach the Rec League

On a recent rainy night, about two dozen spectators gathered at an Equinox Sports Club on the Upper West Side to watch a basketball game: the X-Men vs. Almost Famous. The teams are part of the Equinox Basketball League, which is made up of ex-pros, pickup lifers, and the occasional bona-fide player still looking for a call-up. (One of the players had to quit recently, after he was drafted by the Development League affiliate of the Brooklyn Nets.) Equinox is a fairly swanky gym; the league’s leading scorer is an account manager for a big pharmaceutical company, and a number of the other players work on Wall Street. The games have the feel of a Rucker League for the one per cent. On this particular night, seeding for the upcoming playoffs was at stake. Late in the second half, Almost Famous, the underdog, began to press and harass the X-Men’s bigger, slower guards. It paid off: Almost Famous won 60–47. According to Vasu Kulkarni, the team’s captain, the victory had everything to do with an analytic database and video-streaming service called Krossover.

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The Season of Russell Westbrook and a New Era in N.B.A. Fandom
A World Cup for Tennis?
Tiger Woods and the Amazing 1997 Masters