The House report describes both a catastrophe and a way forward. I respond with shame and defiancemostly shame. These are all obviously pie in the sky, because people are trying to do this and right now, with Congress, it isnt happening. The New Yorker George Packer is an author and staff writer for The New Yorker . The past four years have severely tested those ideals, and under the leadership of Jeffrey Goldberg, who became editor in chief the month before . Trump threw a great deal of accelerant onto smoldering discontent. And this is also the Democratic Party going along with the Reagan consensus. They dominate the landscape, like giant monuments to aspiration, fulfillment and overreach. He told his colleagues that after years of reporting from Iraq, he had . They are as intimate as they are grand, and they offer themselves for worship by ordinary people searching for a suitable object of devotion. He proposes a different vision, which he thinks offers brighter possibilities, centered around the concept of equality and non-demagogic appeals to patriotism. 2,141 likes. They would like security and order, however possible. The New Yorker staff writer George Packer answers readers questions about his article It took Amazon a little while to decide they werent going to cooperate with me, he said. 89 (1): 31-32. Instead, youll be speaking to them ideologically, and they might tune you out. The lesson is not to embrace one or the other; its to combine them with wisdom. I feel the same about our country. Many, including Ms. Nussbaum, have spoken out in favor of the unions current posture. BUT, most of us would like to be able to get health insurance.. And I think were going through something not unlike that: a generational conflict in which the young think the old have sold them out, and the old think the young are arrogant and foolish. Its hard to even begin to think how you start reaching a giant chunk of Real America. The employees ultimately backed down, rejecting the notion of unionism for what seemed in part to be cultural reasons. Betrayed started with a simple feelingdismay and anger at the news that Iraqis I knew were being abandoned to their fate. Writers who are skeptical of the unions tactics some told me they object to its confrontational social media style have bitten their tongues or deleted critical tweets. A lot of people think of Just America as a response to Trump, too, which is why its interesting that youre defining it as just as much a reaction to Smart America. George Packer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author, most recently, of "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.". The writers in the room had been invited merely to a meeting to understand what the existing union drive meant for them, Mr. Taub said, and had no sense that they were secretly being organized. I wonder how much its in the control of, say, one side of the political spectrum to bring the other side back. The New Yorker staff writer George Packer answers readers' questions about his article " Betrayed," from the issue of April 2, 2007. The book achieves this mainly by tracing the lives of various individuals from different backgrounds through the years. Its a phrase Palin used during the 2008 campaign. Politicians are always letting the public off the hookit might be the most unforgivably dishonest thing they do. While he was working . Are junior employees apprentices or a permanent creative underclass? Add that to the extreme difficulty of Iraqis emigrating to the West (Sweden is the exception), and they are basically unwelcome all over the world. Can the rightward forty-five per cent of the country at this point be talked to? Far creepier, however, are the some of the more "complex" explanations for Bales's crime, notably one proffered by Iraq war supporter and neocon-enabler George Packer, in the New Yorker, who denounces "the smugness of the antiwar crowd" and instructs us to avoid "easy condemnations." After all, says Packer, I found my subjects through word of mouth and previous experience. I think a lot of liberal readers who read the book will feel that maybe they want some combination of Just America and Smart America. . All rights reserved. But some also shun its blunt and adversarial language. It doesnt happen in schools. Trumps performative macho is scaring voters in both parties away from women candidates. In 2019, she was a judge of the National Book Award in Nonfiction. Per the Census survey from last year: White Alone: 45.3% Black Alone: 29.2% . Unionized employees from Cond Nast marched from New York University to the home of Anna Wintour, Cond Nasts global chief content officer, last Tuesday. All rights reserved. 467 pp. A United Parcel Service driver delivers packages from Amazon.com in Palo Alto. And if you bloc them that way, if you create monoliths, you will end up not speaking to their actual, as people say, lived experience. Why The New Yorkers Stars Didnt Join Its Union, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/business/media/new-yorker-union.html. The chances of a poor American kid getting into one of the top Ivy League schools today are the same as they were in 1954. And, if Im wrong, then Id be actually quite happy. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. Has the Arab League taken an interest in the plight of displaced Iraqis? But I have also come to believe that Iraq represents a larger failure than just that of individuals in the Bush Administration or the Administration as a whole. Its as if he didnt experience the late sixties and the seventies in the way, say, Bill Clinton did. I dont know enough to agree or disagree., But in terms of telling the story, it was helpful. It doesnt help in policy because you wont know what works and what doesnt, and it doesnt help politically because I think most people still have the idea that individual effort makes a difference and that it should be rewarded. This post has been corrected. Packer, George (2001). The Hulu docuseries is a remarkable work, advancing the prestige true-crime genre's slow but steady reorientation toward centering victims. You have to be very high up to know about it, he said. The basic division that I began to see begins with libertarianism, which I call Free America, which is Reagans America. It means were better. Everyone I met on my last trip feared a wider catastrophe without American troops. Egypt, Jordan, and United Arab Emirates have largely stopped issuing residence visas and are even forcing some Iraqis to return home. But it preceded him. It has an aggressive quality. And I think thats necessary, because weve demonized one another through social media, through isolation during the pandemic, to a point where people are unrecognizable and have been cast in terms of good and evil. We found out last year we had something really big to do. Maybe publishers need to think disruptively and not be victims., Maybe, he added, they should think a little more like predators., [For the Record, 1:15 p.m. PST Feb. 10: An earlier version of this post misquoted author George Packer as saying, Maybe publishers need to think destructively and not be victims. He used the word disruptively, not destructively.], Join Carolyn Kellogg on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Bluntly, re: NewsGuild, what it comes down to for me is that I would never hire an agent who had lied to or about me, Mr. Taub wrote to a WhatsApp group for staff writers after the incident. When Wilson added some steel to his idealism and, as Roosevelt had been urging, brought America into the Great War, his decision ended in a bitter peace in Europe, a period of reaction in America, Wilsons political and personal self-destruction, and the groundwork for the next world war. In the quarter-century after World War II, the country established collective structures, not individual monuments, that channeled the aspirations of ordinary people: state universities, progressive taxation, interstate highways, collective bargaining, health insurance for the elderly, credible news organizations. Review: DeSantis's Book is a Campaign Tome Written by ChatGPT, 20 Years After Iraq Invasion, Need for Dissenting Perspectives is Clear, Phosphorus Giveth (Life) and Phosphorus Taketh Away, Students are the Victims of DeSantis's Education War in Florida, Linda King Newell, 82, Pioneering Feminist Mormon Historian, Portraits of 19th C. Black Charlottesville Show Life, Joy, Black History Month Traces to a Key Meeting in a Chicago YMCA, How (Some) of the Hip Hop Generation Learned Black History, The Executive Branchs Response to the Flood of 1927, The Case For Calling the Language "American", America Fought Its Own Battle Over Books Before it Fought the Nazis. The author of The Assassin's Gate (2005), The Unwinding (2013), and a recently published biography of Richard Holbrooke, Our Man, Packer has written for bastions of liberal thought from the New York Times Magazine to The New Yorker in a distinguished, decades-long career. It is a new aristocracy of credentials, and people are born into it. Some of the large pieces, which are chopped up and welded onto the rest in roughly 20-page blocks, began as articles in The New Yorker, where Mr. Packer is a staff writer. He is also the author of the books The Assassins Gate and The Unwinding. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Barack Obama failed to change the direction of the country, whether a more progressive form of patriotism is possible, and whether the cultural controversies roiling American institutions are an inevitable result of inequality. Some, led by Tad Friend and Jia Tolentino, used the threat of a union and the suggestion that Cond Nast had illegally classified many of them as contractors, which the company disputes to set up a process by which some writers could become employees with health benefits. "Long engagements". American history is one way to get in touch with it. $26. Well be lucky if we do. Because of the difficulties of working in Iraq and the concerns Iraqis have about their safety, this story presented logistical challenges. That doesnt mean it ignores racism, discrimination, disfranchisement, and the history of all of these. (April 29, 2013). But many writers also see what The New Yorker offers as a good deal: a prestigious place to publish that allows them to retain the rights to their work. But its in the bill, its in the law, because fairness demanded it. We use first names with strangers. Its all particularly personal at The New Yorker, where the campaign has pitted a culture built on personal relationships and deep trust against a group of employees who reject the idea that they should be subject to the whims of any boss, no matter how benign. George Packer. What am I writing about here?, What he came up with, he explained, is Amazons relation to the world of culture -- especially books.. Packer has made four tours on assignment in Iraq for The New But youre right: in politics, its barely got a toehold. In half a week, between Quebec and Singapore, Trump showed that the liberal order is hateful to him, and that he wants out. By the whim of the editor, she replied. George Packer's new Atlantic story traces a theme of disappointment with President Joe Biden's failure to live up to his initial ideals as he tracks Biden's shifting views on the long war . In 2003, Packer was awarded two Overseas Press Club awards, one for his 20,000-word examination of the difficulties faced during the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq and the other for his coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone. By Alexander Russo It's no simple task when journalists decide to write about their families' school choices and their children's classroom experiences. Human Rights in North Korea to Stay on UN Security Council Radar,US News is a recognized leader in college, grad school, hospital, mutual fund, and car rankings. Really, nihilism is the only word for it. [3] In a 2022 talk for House of SpeakEasy's Seriously Entertaining program, Packer shared that his father took his own life when he (Packer) was twelve years old, calling it "the big event of my childhood. And that was the animating idea of the left in the first maybe two-thirds of the century. It doesnt quite apply to a different group of Americans, and a different story, which I call Smart America. The writers discussed whether they should follow their colleagues into the NewsGuild, and whether the magazine treated writers fairly. Some salaries at The New Yorker start at $42,000 a year and remain under $60,000 after 20 years on the job. It's a full-scale scholarly biography of Richard Holbrooke, one of the most influential U.S. diplomats of the late 20th Century.[9]. the Some 20 of the writers, many of them marquee names, were getting together to decide how to react to the surprise announcement that their less heralded colleagues fact checkers, copy editors, web producers, social media editors were forming a union and demanding raises. There has been no progress in terms of higher education opening up to Americans of lower classes. Free Americans' individualistic, leave-me-alone conception of . In 1976, a group of employees got fed up with flat wages and, among other things, a 50 percent cut to the magazines annual psychiatric benefit, and brought in the union (then the Newspaper Guild) to set things right. November 2, 2022. He has certainly made it clear hes trying. How much power can employers exercise over their employees? Many writers have tweeted in support. 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