George Packer's Blog, page 95

How the White House Got James Comey Wrong

Early on Monday morning, a couple of hours before the start of the first House Intelligence Committee hearing on Russia’s involvement in the Presidential election, one of Donald Trump’s closest White House advisers made a startling—and completely erroneous—prediction: James Comey, the F.B.I. director, would testify that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. “The Russian collusion thing has always been bullshit,” the official said. “I think Comey will come down and say there absolutely was no contact, collusion, or anything like that with the campaign.”

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The Saga of Tom Brady’s Jersey
How the First Amendment Applies to Trump’s Presidency
Your Russian Connection: Is There Any There, There?

James Comey’s Remarkable Five Hours on Capitol Hill

Just before 3:20 on Monday afternoon, Devin Nunes, the Republican head of the House Intelligence Committee, asked James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who was testifying before the committee on his agency’s investigation into Russian interference in last year’s Presidential election, a last set of questions. Earlier in the hearing, Nunes, seemingly taking his lead from a series of early–morning tweets by President Trump, had focussed his questions on the leaks of classified information that have plagued the Administration since January. Now, though, Nunes got to the crux of the matter: Comey’s public confirmation that the F.B.I. was investigating possible coördination between people associated with the Trump campaign and Russia.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Trump Campaign Has Been Under Investigation Since July
Live: Trump’s “Enemies of the People” Discuss Truth to Power
Able-Bodied Senior Who Watches TV All Day Receives Free Government Meals

Have We Already Seen the Best of the Boxer Known as Triple G?

Most of the boxing fans who filled up Madison Square Garden on Saturday night were hoping to see a great fight, even if they weren’t expecting a competitive one. The main attraction was Gennady Gennadyevich Golovkin, known as Triple G, an astonishingly accomplished middleweight from Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Golovkin is an affable destroyer. He attained the status of cult hero immediately upon making his U.S. début, in 2012, and he has spent the years since trying, with some success, to de-cult himself. On Saturday, the popularity and ubiquity of “GGG” merchandise provided proof of the progress he has made: he had the home-crowd advantage despite the fact that his opponent, Daniel Jacobs, is a Brooklynite and an accomplished fighter himself. Most experts considered these the two best middleweights in the world, though few considered them evenly matched. Golovkin was as much as an eight-to-one favorite, and when The Ring polled twenty-two boxing experts, it couldn’t find a single one who expected Jacobs to win.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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No One Knows Whether Ronda Rousey Still Wants to Fight
Orlando Cruz Fights to Become Boxing’s First Openly Gay Champion
It’s the Fight of the Year and No One Cares

The Trump Campaign Has Been Under Investigation Since July

At 6:35 A.M. on Monday, a few hours before the House Intelligence Committee convened its first public hearing on Russian involvement in the U.S. election, President Donald J. Trump asserted once more that the issue was nothing more than an elaborate political distraction. “This story is FAKE NEWS and everyone knows it!” he tweeted, adding, a short time later, “The Democrats made up and pushed the Russian story as an excuse for running a terrible campaign. Big advantage in Electoral College & lost!” He went on, “The real story that Congress, the FBI and all others should be looking into is the leaking of Classified information. Must find leaker now!”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
James Comey’s Remarkable Five Hours on Capitol Hill
Live: Trump’s “Enemies of the People” Discuss Truth to Power
Able-Bodied Senior Who Watches TV All Day Receives Free Government Meals

Rex Tillerson Is Still Acting Like a C.E.O.

ExxonMobil’s global headquarters are situated on a campus in Irving, Texas, beside a man-made lake. Employees sometimes refer to the glass-and-granite building as the “Death Star,” because of the power that its executives project. During the eleven years that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson served as ExxonMobil’s chairman and chief executive, he had an office on the top floor, in a suite that employees called the “God Pod.” When I visited a few years ago, the building’s interior design eschewed the striving gaudiness of Trump properties; it was more like a Four Seasons untroubled by guests.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Jimmy Breslin and the Lost Voice of the People
Trump’s Flailing Foreign Policy Bewilders the World
The Questionable Account of What Michael Flynn Told the White House

Jimmy Breslin and the Lost Voice of the People

Jimmy Breslin’s first big break came when he was hired, in 1963, as a columnist for the New York Herald Tribune. There was a reason so many American newspapers were called Tribunes, after the Romans who represented the plebes. These newspapers, many now dead or much diminished, saw themselves as voices of the people, a concept that today sounds almost quaint. All over the country, shoe-leather columnists became local celebrities when they wrote with wit and empathy about ordinary people and savaged the powerful. At their best, they captured the soul of a particular city, helping to create an identity that digital journalism—with its global reach but clumsy local coverage—often cannot. When I was growing up in Chicago, my god was Mike Royko, who ended his career at the Chicago Tribune, but the most famous and influential was Breslin, whose death, on Sunday, ends a storied era in American journalism.

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Related:
Rex Tillerson Is Still Acting Like a C.E.O.
Postscript: Jimmy Breslin
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, February 28th

An Extraordinary Statement from a North Korean Prince

Two weeks ago, a group called Cheollima Civil Defense uploaded a forty-second video to YouTube with a caption that read, in Korean, “To the people of North Korea.” In the video, a baby-faced Asian man, speaking accented but fluent English, identifies himself as Kim Han-sol, a North Korean and a member of “the Kim family.” He holds a North Korean passport up to the camera—most of the document’s identifying details were blocked out before the video was released—as if to prove his identity. Finally, the young man says, in a calm voice, “My father has been killed a few days ago. I’m currently with my mother and my sister. And we’re very grateful to”—here, again, the video was edited, the audio removed and the man’s lips blocked out, presumably to obscure details of his location and associates—“and we hope this gets better soon.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
China’s North Korea Problem
Two Koreas, Two Cults, Two Internets
Nuclear Lessons for Clinton and Trump from 1949

Postscript: Jimmy Breslin

On a quiet Sunday morning in December, 1999, Jimmy Breslin, a stocky man then in his early seventies, his hair a shock of white, stepped out of a car that had dropped him at a street corner in the Hasidic section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He walked briskly up to one of several buildings in the neighborhood under construction. When he spotted a man looking at the building permits stapled to the entrance and taking notes, he started waving and calling.

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Related:
Postscript: Debbie Reynolds, 1932-2016
2016: The Year in Forty-Five New Yorker Postscripts
William Trevor in The New Yorker

The Story Behind the Fire That Killed Forty Teen-Age Girls in a Guatemalan Children’s Home

The number of teen-age girls who died when a fire broke out on the morning of March 8th in a state-run home for minors on the outskirts of Guatemala City now stands at forty. Those who perished were among fifty-two girls who’d been confined to a schoolroom at Hogar Seguro Virgen de la Asunción after a night in which they’d rioted and run away, before being captured by police and brought back to the home. Nineteen died at the scene of the schoolroom blaze, and the others in the two Guatemala City hospitals that received the injured. Almost immediately, Guatemalan and international news reports began to speculate that the girls might have been locked in the schoolroom, perhaps as punishment.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Your Questions About “Donald Trump’s Worst Deal,” Answered
Chaos in Brazil: More to Come?
Chicago’s Violence and Trump’s Ominous Tweets

Ida Tin’s Battle to Build Clue, a Period-Tracking App

Ida Tin wanted to build an app to help women track their periods. For months, she went door to door, pitching the concept to early-stage investors in Berlin, London, New York, and Silicon Valley. Often, Tin, a soft-spoken thirty-seven-year-old from Copenhagen with cerulean-framed glasses, was the only woman in the room. Many potential investors balked at the notion of software with inputs for levels of menstrual bleeding, breast tenderness, and sex drive, or the capacity to digitally share windows of ovulation with a partner. Time and again, Tin told me, the men sitting across from her in pitch meetings said, “I only invest in products I can use myself.” The idea embarrassed even some who saw its business potential; one venture capitalist who eventually made a small investment insisted that his involvement be kept private. But Tin persisted, cobbling together fifty thousand euros. She launched the app, called Clue, in 2013, basing it in Berlin. It quietly amassed millions of active users, primarily in the United States. “This was clearly not a niche product,” Tin said. This past November, Clue announced that it had closed a twenty-million-euro round of funding.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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The Not-So-Surprising Survival of Foursquare
The Tech Resistance to the Trump Refugee Ban
This Week in Fiction: David Gilbert on Writing About a Man Who Is Trapped as a Boy