thesmithian-blog reblogged
The President talks about climate change, Iran, the atmosphere in Washington, and the future of American policy in these outtakes from a series of exclusive interviews with David Remnick: http://nyr.kr/LY18Sw
Photograph: Pete Souza
[meaningful glance]
Source: newyorker.com
...the war looks more and more like a choice between Assad and Al Qaeda.
George Packer, at the New Yorker
The drug war is sometimes portrayed as irrational, but it is, in fact, irrational in a selective way—one targeted at blacks and other minorities. The decisions by Eric Holder and Shira Scheindlin point the war, and the country, back in a direction where law enforcement will spend more time chasing the right people for the right reasons.
Jeffrey Toobin, at the New Yorker
This may be the first sensible step that Obama has taken in the Syrian crisis, and may prove to be one of the better ones of his Presidency—even if he loses the vote, as could happen. Politically, he may have just saved his second term from being consumed by Benghazi-like recriminations and spared himself Congressional mendacity about what they all might have done. It will likely divide the G.O.P. Although he said that he didn’t really, truly need to ask Congress for permission, he is doing so.
Amy Davidson, at the New Yorker
Eleanor Roosevelt is remembered as a leader, a warrior for good. Hillary Clinton’s legacy may not be far off from that: another female pioneer, a formidable Secretary of State, who takes nonsense from nobody. Their husbands’ indiscretions were part of their stories and part of their marriages, but not the whole, to them or to history. Can’t Huma have that, too?
Emily Greenhouse, at the New Yorker
Obama ended his speech...'We should also have confidence that kids these days, I think, have more sense than we did back then, and certainly more than our parents did or our grandparents did; and that along this long, difficult journey, we’re becoming a more perfect union—not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.' As someone in my grandfather’s generation might say, If the Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise.
Matthew McKnight, at the New Yorker
There is an echo, in what people say Martin should and shouldn’t have done, of what people say to women when bad things happen to them in dark places. Why did you walk that way, why were you out in the rain? Why did you walk in the direction of the man instead of running? Why did you think you had the privilege to go out and get candy for a child? You didn’t; you should have known. It shouldn’t be that way. A woman should be able to walk on a dark street in Florida, or anywhere. That she might not be able to doesn’t make a similar restraint on Martin any more reasonable—one injustice doesn’t vindicate another—and, in a way, only adds to the pain. One of the answers, among the most mortifying, and rightly underlying the rage at the verdict, is that Trayvon Martin wasn’t supposed to act like a man. He wasn’t quite one, yet. He was a child, who had just turned seventeen. He was learning how to be a man—and he had some reasonable guides in his parents, as we have learned through watching their utter dignity throughout the trial. That night, though, Martin was just guessing.
Amy Davidson, at the New Yorker
...at our safest almost all of us are Trayvon Martin to someone else.
Jelani Cobb (@jelani9), at the New Yorker
...when the [New York Mets] decided that it would be a nice gesture to organize game-day festivities with the local American Indian community, it took months for someone to realize the potentially problematic scheduling of Native American Heritage Day on July 25th, when the Atlanta Braves were in town. Faced with the prospect of embarrassing their guests and not wanting to appear insensitive, the Mets followed centuries of American tradition and shafted the Native Americans.
Caitlin Kelly, at the New Yorker
...most crucially...is an unarmed black teenager ever entitled to stand his ground?
Jelani Cobb, at the New Yorker
We’ve entered a new terrain where American meritocracy is a faith, not an ideal; where we must muster evidence of bias in increasingly vast volumes to warrant policies applied in ever narrowing circumstances; where nothing qualifies as what we once called racism, and commitment to this perspective is all but data-proof. The fault lines in this society are the problem that no longer has a name, or an apparent solution.
Jelani Cobb, at the New Yorker
...'racial polarization in voting' makes the Act more relevant than ever...if one party sees that another attracts more minority votes—and we have seen this—it can have a motive for playing with the laws and moving polling stations to suppress turnout, a motivation that has to do with power rather than with simple, crude, racism. This is why the Roberts vision of transcendent American niceness is inadequate. Eight months after a Presidential election that saw bitter fights over voter suppression, it is highly odd for the Court to be calling such concerns quaint. Roberts does concede that there is still racial discrimination, and that it might even be a problem for voting—he just treats it as something that has dissipated like a mist, thinly and evenly distributed in the American air, not needing the “extraordinary” measures of the V.R.A. And we are not done with history yet.
Amy Davidson, at the New Yorker
Having lived in the United States for almost thirty years, I am always amazed that Americans persist in believing that this is a land of unparalleled opportunity and social mobility. A bit suspect to begin with, the Horatio Alger story has been transformed, over the decades, into a chronic mental block. To well-educated youngsters from affluent backgrounds who know how to work the system, and even to well-educated immigrants such as myself, this is indeed a land of great opportunity. But for all too many working-class Americans—and a lot of them aren’t members of minority groups—U.S. society is less of a launchpad than a glue trap. With their feet stuck to the ground, they have little prospect of ascending very far.
John Cassidy, at the New Yorker
This [Obama] Administration seems to have forgotten that Americans have a perfect right to keep secrets.
Amy Davidson, at the New Yorker