George Packer's Blog, page 89

A Modest Proposal for the March for Science

In 1959, not long after the Soviets’ Sputnik launch astonished and terrified the nation, Dwight Eisenhower named George B. Kistiakowsky, a Harvard chemist, to the position of Presidential science adviser. Jerome Wiesner, who would later become the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sat on the Presidential science-advisory committee. Kistiakowsky was a Republican and Wiesner a Democrat. They met with the President every month.

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Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, March 28th

The U.S. Air Strike in Syria: First Thoughts

The United States launched a missile strike in Syria on Thursday, in response to a chemical-weapons attack this week by the Syrian regime that killed dozens of civilians. Below, New Yorker writers offer some initial reactions to the news.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Gorsuch Wins, the Filibuster Loses

“This isn’t really about the nominee, anyway,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Thursday morning, in his prelude to the detonation of the Senate’s “nuclear option” to push the confirmation of Judge Neil Gorsuch, for a seat on the Supreme Court, forward for a vote. McConnell was talking about the Democrats’ motives in staging what he called a “partisan filibuster” of Gorsuch, which the nuclear option, by changing Senate rules, would end. The vote to change the rules passed around lunchtime, by a vote of 52–48—all the Republicans were on one side and all the Democrats on the other—setting up a confirmation vote for Gorsuch on Friday. He will likely get it. Then the Senate, if it likes, can go back to its ineffectual arguing about who is to blame for what. Going nuclear was a milestone; given what the Senate has already become, however, it is hard to see it as a tragedy.

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The New Dark Art of Trump Towerology

When Donald Trump took office, it was clear that one essential task, in the time ahead, would be to distinguish between the sickening and the horrifying—between things that, however much one opposed them or was appalled by them, were part of the normal working-out of the program of the Republican Party and therefore part of the normal oscillations of American power, and those that were completely without precedent, that subverted or assaulted the very premises and foundations of American democracy.

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A World Cup for Tennis?

This weekend, Davis Cup teams from the United States and Australia will square off in Brisbane, but few Americans—even ardent tennis fans—will be paying attention. This could be blamed on drastic time-zone disparities (though the Australian Open this winter attracted the most U.S. viewers in years); or the nagging lack of Americans at the top of the men’s game (though, at the moment, Jack Sock is No. 7 in the world in A.T.P. points earned this calendar year); or the fact that sports fans sick to death of the gray, gray winter have both baseball and the Masters to choose from (though there is talk among golf nuts that, thanks to a February heat wave, the azaleas at Augusta National are already past their peak). But the demise of interest in the Davis Cup is not just an American phenomenon, and it is not only a matter of viewership. Two months ago, in the first round of international Davis Cup play, Novak Djokovic was the only top-ten player to participate.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Steve Bannon Is Losing to the Globalists

Bashar al-Assad’s forces appear to have used chemical weapons on Syrian civilians again; Kim Jong-un’s North Korea has fired off another intermediate-range ballistic missile; and Xi Jinping, the President of China, has arrived in the United States for a summit meeting with Donald Trump. Big news all, you might think. But inside the political bubble, the main topic of conversation and speculation at the moment is how and why Steve Bannon, Trump’s senior political adviser, got booted from the National Security Council.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Can a Pro-Trump Meme Maker Get a Real News Scoop?

Last summer, I noticed that many of the most noxious and effective anti-Hillary Clinton memes on the Internet—that she had Parkinson’s, for example—could be traced back to one man in Southern California, a former lawyer and self-help author named Mike Cernovich. I called him on the phone. Cernovich maintained a blog called Danger and Play, and he was particularly good at attracting attention on platforms like Twitter and the video-streaming app Periscope. He described himself as an American nationalist and a “Pulitzer-worthy journalist,” and had adopted many of journalism’s linguistic tics—his “scoops” were attributed to an entity he called Cernovich Media. What, I asked him, was Cernovich Media, exactly? Was he renting office space, hiring reporters, filling out W-4 forms? He laughed. “It’s definitely just me, dude,” he said. “I run a lean operation. Come out and you’ll see it for yourself.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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How a Veteran of Fox News Boycotts Does It

This week, a number of companies pulled their ads from Bill O’Reilly’s Fox News show after the Times reported that the host and his employer have paid millions of dollars to settle accusations of sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior by O’Reilly. Angelo Carusone took the opportunity to begin tweeting from an account that he set up in March, 2010: @stoporeilly. In 2009, Carusone’s @stopbeck account pressured brands to pull ads from the program that Glenn Beck, the conspiracy-minded conservative commentator, was then hosting on Fox News. It proved an effective tactic. Partly in response to Carusone’s tweets, advertisers began to disassociate themselves from Beck’s show. Beck and Fox News parted ways in 2011. Carusone started working at Media Matters, the left-wing nonprofit that battles what it considers “conservative misinformation” in the media, in 2010. He’s now the president of the organization. On Tuesday, Carusone spoke by phone about his Beck campaign in light of the ongoing O’Reilly situation. His account has been edited and condensed.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Minnesota Eight Don’t Want to Be Deported to a Country They’ve Never Lived In

The Minnesota Eight are a group of Cambodian men in their thirties and forties with a troubled history in common: each came to the U.S. legally as a child refugee in the nineteen-eighties but later lost his green card after being convicted of a crime. By law, legal permanent residents are automatically deportable if they’ve committed an aggravated felony, and thousands of people every year are deported after completing prison terms. But when these men got out of prison they found themselves in a strange situation. Because of a long-standing diplomatic dispute between the U.S. and Cambodia, they were released rather than deported. Several of them got married and started families; they took jobs, and settled down. Twice a year, they were required to check in at their local Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office, in St. Paul, Minnesota, but after a few years these visits became routine. Then, last summer, when they each showed up for their appointments with ICE, they were abruptly rearrested, and informed that their deportations were back on schedule.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Tiger Woods and the Amazing 1997 Masters

It’s Masters week, the annual ritual of thrilling golf, whispered commentary, blooming magnolias, white-suited caddies, and “patrons” in Bermuda shorts. (For the sensitive souls who run Augusta National Golf Club, which has hosted the tournament since 1934, the “fans” is too redolent of beer-swilling frat boys.)

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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