John Cassidy's Blog, page 45

Can Google Become a Normal Business?

My colleagues Ken Auletta and Vauhini Vara have already posted insightful accounts of Google’s decision to reinvent itself. Quoting a former Google employee, Ken writes that the company’s co-founder Larry Page, who returned to the C.E.O. job in 2011, when Eric Schmidt resigned, wants to get back to being a big-picture guy who concentrates on making exciting new stuff, such as driverless cars, bipedal robots, and life-extending gizmos. It made sense, therefore, for the company to adopt a holding-company structure, in which most of Google’s Internet businesses, such as Web search, YouTube, and Android, become separate divisions of a new parent company called Alphabet, which will be run by Page and Google’s other co-founder, Sergey Brin.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Google’s New Alphabetical Order
Why Larry Page Is Stepping Away
What’s Behind the Overwrought Reaction to the A.I.G. Verdict?

Trump on the Ropes at the First Debate

If you decided to skip last night’s Republican debate, you made an error. There has rarely been anything like it: two hours of non-stop verbal fisticuffs, and, at the end of it, this viewer, at least, was sorry it was over.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Daily Cartoon: Friday, August 7th
Walker Emerges as Leading Candidate to Run Enterprise Rent-a-Car Branch
Trump More Heinous Than Previously Thought

How Do You Debate Trump?

I don’t know about you, but I’m grateful to Donald Trump for one thing. He’s made the first official Republican Presidential debate, which will take place on Thursday night, at Cleveland’s Quicken Loans Arena, a heck of a lot more interesting than it would have been had he decided to sit out the 2016 race. Rarely, if ever, has a debate this early in the primary process created such keen anticipation.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Jindal Says He Didn’t Want to Be in Lame Debate Anyway
After Trump, Will It Be Walker?
What’s the Right Way to Teach Civics?

How Durable Is Donald Trump’s Surge?

The Donald Trump surge continues. In the past two days, four new national polls have been released, and they have all shown the garrulous billionaire extending his lead over the other candidates in the G.O.P. primary. In some polls, Trump is getting double the support of his nearest rivals.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
After Trump, Will It Be Walker?
Thank You for Running!

Why Biden Would Be a Serious Contender

The Times report that Vice-President Joe Biden is seriously considering entering the 2016 Presidential race isn’t exactly news. He’s been mulling such a move for at least a couple of years. “It’s as likely I run as I don’t run,” Biden said on the talk show “The View” in February, 2014. In an interview with Politico’s Glenn Thrush that month, he laid out the sort of campaign he could conduct, focussing on rising inequality and the wage squeeze. “It’s either going to be me or someone else who is going to make this argument in the Democratic Party.” As I wrote at the time, “He’s still full of energy, he’s served President Obama loyally, he loves the game, and he thinks—pundits and pollsters be damned—that this might be the moment for an old-school, shit-kicking, hand-grasping, mouth-running, stick-up-for-the-working-stiff pol like himself.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Joe Biden’s Respect Calculation
Daily Cartoon: Monday, August 3rd
Comment from the August 10 & 17, 2015, Issue

Donald Trump’s Troubles Are Just Beginning

With just more than a week to go until the first televised Republican debate, Donald Trump remains the center of attention. On Monday, the Daily Beast dredged up an old story about his ex-wife, Ivana, accusing him of forcing her to have non-consensual sex. (Ivana Trump has issued a statement calling the story “totally without merit.”) What grabbed the attention of campaign watchers wasn’t so much the allegation itself, which was made during the Trumps’ acrimonious divorce case, twenty-odd years ago, but a statement to The Daily Beast by one of Donald Trump’s top lawyers, Michael Cohen, who said, “You cannot rape your spouse.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
In Bid to Take Attention from Trump, Other Fifteen Hopefuls Release Joint Sex Tape
Comment from the August 3, 2015, Issue
Republicans Release Debate Format

Lax Gun Laws Are Becoming a National-Security Issue

Another shooting spree; another debate about American gun laws.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump Says He Heroically Avoided Capture in Vietnam by Staying in U.S.
Cover Story: Barry Blitt’s “Belly Flop”
John McCain Has a Few Things to Say About Donald Trump

Greece’s Surrender: A Return to 1919, or to 1905?

With the vote by Greece’s parliament, early Thursday morning, to accept the harsh terms demanded by the country’s creditors, the debate about how we got to this point is sure to intensify. In a post earlier in the week, when Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras first agreed to the deal, Larry Elliott, the Guardian’s economics editor, pointed the finger at Tsipras’s Syriza government, saying, “Greeks will be asking today what has been the point of the last month of diplomatic theatre: the endless meetings, the violent rhetoric, the walkouts, and the calling of the referendum. The answer is less than nothing. Untold damage has been caused to the Greek economy for no purpose whatsoever.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Greece Needs the Euro
A Debt Deal to Keep Greece in the Eurozone?
Why Europe Needs to Offer Greece Debt Relief

The Word Hillary Clinton Didn’t Say

Hillary Clinton’s big speech about the economy on Monday generated a wide range of reactions from the punditocracy. The Times’s David Brooks thought it was politically clever: “She’s cleared the first political hurdle of the campaign,” he wrote. Vox’s Matthew Yglesias said that Clinton’s policy agenda amounted to a rebuke of neoliberalism and indicated a “paleoliberal revival.” Politico’s Ben White reckoned that the speech was a non-event. “The snap reaction among Wall Street investors, economists and ardent financial reformers who thrill to the soak-the-rich rhetoric of Bernie Sanders was a collective: ‘Meh. What’s next?’ ” he reported.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Keep Hamilton on the Ten. Put Tubman on the Twenty.
Interparty Debates? Yes, Please
Hillary Clinton’s Two Challenges: The Media and Bernie Sanders

A Humiliating Deal for Greece

As Europe’s leaders return home from Brussels, after a marathon negotiating session that kept Greece in the eurozone at great cost to the country’s political sovereignty, the political landscape of the continent looks different, and not a little ominous. In forcing Alexis Tsipras’s government into abject surrender—over the entreaties of some of its neighbors, France in particular—Germany has, for perhaps the first time since reunification, in 1990, blatantly exerted its power on the European stage.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Greece Needs the Euro
No Longer Getting Lost at the Strand
A Fearful Frenzy: The Art Market Now