George Packer's Blog, page 93

Tommy Haas Confronts Tennis’s Future

Tommy Haas, the thirty-eight-year-old German tennis player, was once one of the top players on the A.T.P. tour; he is now one of the oldest. He is also now the tournament director of the BNP Paribas Open, at Indian Wells—the kind of corporate job typically held by people known for their operations-management skills, not for their flowing one-handed backhand. Last Thursday, at 9:15 in the morning, Haas was driving to the grounds of Indian Wells, hoping to get a hit in—he was planning to play in the Miami Open, which began a few days later—when his phone rang. Nick Kyrgios, a talented and mercurial twenty-one-year-old Australian, had been up all night, feeling ill; he thought it was food poisoning. Kyrgios was due to play Roger Federer in the quarter-finals at noon, in what was to be the marquee match of the day, and perhaps of the tournament.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Spectacular Relief from the World at the Australian Open
An American Tennis Player Finds Her Voice
Glimpsing the Future of Men’s Tennis

The Health-Care Debacle Was a Failure of Conservatism

Let the recriminations begin! Actually, the health-care-failure finger-pointing got under way well before Friday, when Donald Trump and Paul Ryan cancelled a House vote on the American Health Care Act. A day earlier, aides to the President let it be known that he had come to regret going along with Ryan’s idea of making health care his first legislative priority.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The G.O.P.’s Health-Care Failure: First Thoughts
How a Republican Congressman Accidentally Disclosed a Secret Intelligence Debate
What the G.O.P. Doesn’t Get About Who Pays for Health Care

The G.O.P.’s Health-Care Failure: First Thoughts

House Republican leaders abruptly pulled their health-care proposal, the American Health Care Act, from consideration on the House floor on Friday. Below, New Yorker writers offer some initial reactions to the news.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Health-Care Debacle Was a Failure of Conservatism
How a Republican Congressman Accidentally Disclosed a Secret Intelligence Debate
What the G.O.P. Doesn’t Get About Who Pays for Health Care

Face to Face with the Ghost of ISIS

On a crisp spring day in March, in the northern city of Sulaymaniyah, I met Abu Islam, a senior ISIS leader nicknamed the Ghost of ISIS by Iraqi intelligence for his elusiveness. He was escorted into a small office with faux-wood paneling and no windows at the Special Forces Security Compound in Kurdistan. His hands were manacled in front of him; he was blindfolded by a dark hood pulled over his loose black Shirley Temple curls. Long sought by the Iraqi government, Abu Islam was notorious for running clandestine cells of suicide bombers—some of whom were as young as twelve—and carrying out covert terrorist operations beyond the Islamic State’s borders. Having had a few years of religious training, he was also tasked with teaching the unique ISIS version of Islam to new fighters. Still in his mid-twenties, Abu Islam rose to become the ISIS “emir” of Iraq’s oil-rich province of Kirkuk.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Waiting for Resettlement in the Age of Trump
A Photographer’s View of a Battle to Destroy ISIS
A Temporary Reprieve for Some Iraqi Refugees

A Break, but No Freedom Yet, for a Bronx Man Convicted in a Shaky Murder Case

Earlier this week, a judge in the Bronx ruled in the case of Edward Garry, who has served more than twenty years in prison for the murder, in 1995, of a retired N.Y.P.D. detective. The judge’s opinion ran sixty-one pages, but it was five words that mattered most: “a new trial is ordered.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Losing a Son in the New York State Prisons
My Prison Cell: A Place Kept Compulsively Clean
My Prison Cell: A Visit from an Outsider

Can the Cubs Do It Again?

MESA, ARIZONA— A year ago, as the promising young Chicago Cubs prepared for the 2016 season, the only cloud that hung over their training camp was the palpable weight of a hundred and eight years of futility. Though management, coaches, and players cheekily denied it, The Curse was a brooding and inescapable presence. Could these Cubs, torn down and rebuilt over several dreadful seasons, overcome the most prodigious title drought in the history of professional sports?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
At Last
Daily Cartoon: Thursday, November 3rd
The Thrilling Competence of Joe Maddon and Terry Francona

How a Republican Congressman Accidentally Disclosed a Secret Intelligence Debate

On Monday, when the House Intelligence Committee held its first public hearing about Russian involvement in the U.S. Presidential election, Republican members were almost completely focussed on leaks.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Health-Care Debacle Was a Failure of Conservatism
The G.O.P.’s Health-Care Failure: First Thoughts
What the G.O.P. Doesn’t Get About Who Pays for Health Care

A Last Chance for Turkish Democracy

The first time I met Selahattin Demirtaş, the leader of Turkey’s largest Kurdish political party, known as the H.D.P., he arrived at a restaurant in Istanbul with a single assistant accompanying him. Demirtaş is warm and funny. Among other things, he is an accomplished player of the saz, a string instrument that resembles the oud. At the time—it was 2011—Demirtaş was trying to lead his party and people away from a history of confrontation with the country’s central government. It wasn’t easy. Like other Kurdish leaders in Turkey, Demirtaş had spent time in prison and seen many of his comrades killed. I remember him telling me how, in the nineteen-nineties, when civil unrest in the country’s Kurdish areas was hitting its bloody peak, a particular make of car—a white Renault—had been notorious in Kurdish towns. The cars were used by Turkish intelligence officers, who had developed a terrifying reputation for torturing and executing Kurds. “I’ve been inside the Renaults,’’ Demirtaş told me. “A lot of people I know never made it out of them.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What the G.O.P. Doesn’t Get About Who Pays for Health Care
Trump’s Russia Problem Is Far from Marginal
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, March 22nd

Trump’s Russia Problem Is Far from Marginal

It’s getting difficult to keep up with the Russia/Trump story, but here’s some of what you need to know. On Wednesday night, CNN reported that the F.B.I. has information suggesting that “associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What the G.O.P. Doesn’t Get About Who Pays for Health Care
How the House Freedom Caucus Dominated Trump on Health Care
After an Immigration Raid, a City’s Students Vanish

How the House Freedom Caucus Dominated Trump on Health Care

At 11:30 on Thursday morning, about two dozen members of the House Freedom Caucus arrived at the Oval Office. The arch-conservative House members were there for the last of a series of sessions in which President Donald Trump would try to convince them to support his health-care bill. Just two days earlier, Trump had reportedly told the group’s leader, North Carolina’s Mark Meadows, that the White House would target him politically if he continued to oppose the bill. “I’m gonna come after you,” Trump reportedly said. Since then, several other more pragmatic Republicans had announced that they would vote against the bill. This meant that Trump likely needs the support of all but about eight members of the Freedom Caucus. The scene in the Oval Office was almost an exact reprise of the G.O.P.’s major intra-Party standoffs of the past few years (over the debt ceiling, and whether John Boehner should remain the Party’s leader), with Meadows holding out and bending the Party toward his faction. Trump, who promised to come at Washington from a new angle, was in the same position as Boehner and Paul Ryan before him, the face of the institutional Republican Party. With no Democrats supporting the bill, he needed Ryan’s whips to get it passed, and so he sank back into Ryan’s ideology.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What the G.O.P. Doesn’t Get About Who Pays for Health Care
Trump’s Russia Problem Is Far from Marginal
After an Immigration Raid, a City’s Students Vanish