George Packer's Blog, page 226

In 2003, when Michael Lewis published “Moneyball,” his book about the ingenious, shoestring operations of the Oakland Athletics and their supremo Billy Beane, he gave the culture a way of describing a certain kind of insurrection, in which outsiders deploy the clean weapons of data and analysis to expose the biases of insiders, and improve upon the bad decisions that the insiders have made. Soon people started to notice this pattern everywhere. The Times discovered “the Moneyball of campaign advertising.” Two years later, the national television networks found “the Moneyball of music.” Eventually, TV Guide reported, in 2012, the year after Brad Pitt played Billy Beane in the movie version, the idea had been stretched so thin that the executive producer of “CBS This Morning” kept an A’s baseball cap displayed in the show’s offices and told his staff that they should consider themselves the “Moneyball of TV.”

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Earlier this month, the price of a first-class stamp fell for the first time since 1919. The drop, from forty-nine cents to forty-seven cents, took place following the expiration of a rate surcharge that was enacted in 2014 to help the U.S. Postal Service deal with the aftereffects of the Great Recession. The dip likely won’t matter much to most consumers, but it amounts to a loss of about two billion dollars a year for an organization that lost 5.1 billion dollars in the 2015 fiscal year alone—enough, that is, to substantially worsen the financial troubles that the service has been facing ever since the Internet rendered its first-class-mail business pretty much irrelevant. The press release announcing the price cut sounded as though it had been written by the most sullen clerk at your local post office: Megan J. Brennan, the postmaster general, was quoted calling the rate decrease “unfortunate,” and the service vowed to work to reinstate the surcharge.

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Hillary Clinton has a bragging problem. It’s not that she brags any more than the average politician, and she certainly does so less than Donald Trump. (Who doesn’t?) But bragging, or if you prefer, self-promotion, is still a trap for women in a way it isn’t quite, or not in the same way, for men. There are a lot of reasons why some Democratic voters can’t warm up to Clinton, and many of those reasons are substantive and gender-neutral: voters on the left of the Party prefer the consistent policy positions of Bernie Sanders, particularly on income inequality, the minimum wage, and campaign finance; they object to the slippery expediency that both Clintons have displayed in their long run on the American political stage. But then there are those many, many other ways that Clinton is somehow not allowed to get it quite right; she’s either too hard or too soft, too much or too little of a feminist. There’s always something wrong, even if the particular something is hard to identify and endlessly open to parsing: her laugh, her voice, her ankles, her hair, her pantsuits, her marriage.

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The official scenario, according to the Mexican government, of what befell the forty-three students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Normal School, in Ayotzinapa, in Guerrero state, on the night and morning of September 26 and 27, 2014, is generally referred to as the “historical truth.” Say those words anywhere in Mexico, and people know what you mean. The phrase comes from a press conference held in January, 2015, when the head of the government’s Procuraduría General de la República (P.G.R.) at the time, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam, announced that the forty-three students had been incinerated at a trash dump near the town of Cocula by members of the Guerreros Unidos drug-trafficking gang, after being turned over to them by members of the Iguala municipal police. This, he declared, was the “historical truth.”

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It is often said, and it appears to be true, that Hillary Clinton is more hawkish on foreign policy than President Obama. But what sort of hawk is she? And, if she were to be elected to the White House, how would her approach differ from Obama’s? Thanks to two deeply reported pieces of journalism—one just released about Clinton, from Mark Landler, of the Times, and one from last month on Obama, by Jeffrey Goldberg, of The Atlantic—we now have more information to help us answer these questions.

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Susan Ades Stone, one of the women behind a campaign to put Harriet Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, is a big fan of the musical “Hamilton.” Like Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s creator, she had mixed feelings in June of last year, when the Treasury Department announced that, rather than replacing Andrew Jackson on the twenty, as Ades Stone’s Women on 20s campaign had wanted, it would put a woman on the ten-dollar bill along with Alexander Hamilton. Last month, after she and the campaign’s co-creator, her friend Barbara Ortiz Howard, scored tickets to see “Hamilton,” she vowed to get backstage and meet Miranda. The three of them had a lot to discuss, she thought. All of them would have preferred for the Treasury Department to drop Jackson, a now-unpopular President who opposed central banking and was largely responsible for the historical expulsion of Native Americans from their land. Ades Stone and Howard brought Women on 20s hats to “Hamilton,” hoping to give some to Miranda.

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More than a decade ago, Fidel Castro’s personal physician founded “The Hundred-and-Twenty-Year Club,” propounding the idea that, with proper diet and exercise, Cubans could live to that august age—and he often boasted that the man who would prove his theory was none other than Fidel Castro. In the months before their longtime jefe máximo fell ill, in 2006, Cubans told jokes about Fidel’s notional immortality. In one, Fidel was given a Galápagos tortoise for his birthday, asked how long it would live, and was told that they could survive for a century. He declined the gift, saying, “The problem with pets is you grow attached to them, and then they die on you.”

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Curt Schilling crossed over from star pitcher to Boston folk hero on the night of October 19, 2004, when he started Game Six of the American League Championship Series against the Yankees with splotches of what looked like blood on the sock that covered his right ankle. Schilling had injured that ankle in the previous series, and he’d pitched poorly in the first game against the Yankees. But there he was again, after some medical assistance, giving it another go. Joe Buck, the game’s announcer, helped with some on-the-spot mythologizing: “Like a scene from ‘The Natural,’ Schilling climbs the mound and prepares to take on this Yankee lineup.” He pitched brilliantly that night, giving up one run in seven innings, as the Red Sox continued what some observers would call the greatest series in sports history, from down three games to zero, which would culminate, the next night, in a Game Seven rout of their rivals. A week later, Schilling would turn in another solid performance in the second game against the Cardinals in the World Series, which the Sox would sweep, giving the team its first title since the Woodrow Wilson Administration. For history, Game Six against the Yankees would be known as the “bloody sock” game.

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If my social-media feeds are any indication, Hillary Clinton’s big victory in the New York Democratic primary has left many of Bernie Sanders’s supporters feeling upset, angry, and disillusioned. Some are blaming voter fraud, others are blaming the media, and others are simply aghast. On Facebook, one Bernie enthusiast asked, how can so many people have voted for Hillary? I didn’t meet anybody who was voting for her.

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In the late summer of 2009, lawyers at the Securities and Exchange Commission were preparing to bring charges in what they expected would be their first big crackdown coming out of the financial crisis. The investigators had been looking into Goldman Sachs’s mortgage-securities business, and were preparing to take on the bank over a complex deal, known as Abacus, that it had arranged with a hedge fund. They believed that Goldman had committed securities violations in developing Abacus, and were ready to charge the firm.

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