His award-winning biography, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, was released in May 2019. For example, in your Letter from Sudan, published in the magazine last year, you described the Sudanese politician Hasan al-Turabi right down to his flower-patterned polyester socks. Where do you get your inspiration? Packer was born in California around 1960. And if we have a politics that focusses on that, and tries to bring us closer to that, I think thats a healthier narrative than any of the four Ive described. Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Author, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America Doug Sovern, KCBS Radio Political Reporter - Moderator. 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. Our mission is to get Southern California reading and talking. Trump barely won, and I think Obama would have been elected to a third term. But they were also suspicious of the NewsGuild, and began a parallel set of meetings with its rival, the Writers Guild of America, East. Like many Germans of my generation, I am fully aware of the fact that we owe the U.S., and it breaks my heart to see a good friend choose the path of (self) destruction. George Packer. Or maybe a little less, because the motives of Trump voters are very hard to break down. Richard Armitage, when I interviewed him, placed the blame on a complete lack of accountability at the highest levels. 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. They have all kinds of identities. I still am looking for some way to describe us as a people, as Americans. Mr. Remnick reports directly to Cond Nasts chief executive. That doesnt mean it ignores racism, discrimination, disfranchisement, and the history of all of these. Anti-Americanism is as old as the Republic, largely a European horror at the rise of a commercial power that seemed to have no cultural greatness. Why The New Yorkers Stars Didnt Join Its Union, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/business/media/new-yorker-union.html. [6], Packer was a Holtzbrinck Fellow Class of Fall 2009 at the American Academy in Berlin.[7]. Can Clinton win it back? (April 29, 2013). If your goal is to slow climate change, or reverse inequality, or stop racism, or rebuild democracy, you will need the national solidarity that comes from patriotism. How do you do this without engaging in a nationalism that people dont like, which is I think the reason that liberal, progressive politicians have always had trouble doing it? George Packer, Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow and ASU Future of War Fellow, wrote a book, Our Man, about Richard Holbrooke and American foreign policy.Packer has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 2003. It means were better. A new mood of activism has swept through the home of the mascot Eustace Tilley. He is the author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, a New York Times bestseller, which won the 2013 National Book Award for non-fiction. Exactly. Mr. Remnick declined to be interviewed, but said in an email that his two goals were that we achieve our highest editorial ambitions and that we work together with fairness, adding, Ill be glad to see us sign a foundational contract that memorializes our commitment to both., Many of the writers I spoke to said they saw Mr. Remnick as caught between an uncompromising union and an ailing parent company. One thing thats been said is that people on the left claim to speak for women, or people of color, and then, when it comes to the ballot box, Joe Biden overwhelmingly beats all the other Democrats with Black voters. The Gazelle Project targeted small independent publishers to extract better terms for Amazon -- as a cheetah would target a gazelle. As I read your article, I got a sickening feeling that we have been here before. He now writes for The Atlantic. But somehow, maybe because of where he comes from or what kind of career hes had, he doesnt feel like a very modern figure. The Hulu docuseries is a remarkable work, advancing the prestige true-crime genre's slow but steady reorientation toward centering victims. I feel the same about our country. Ive read and heard that many Vietnamese felt abandoned at the end of the Vietnam WarI highly recommend Frank Snepps book Decent Interval, about the last days of the Americans in Saigon. Is it a failure of leadership? Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights. . In 2019, she was a judge of the National Book Award in Nonfiction. By the whim of the editor, she replied. That dynamic poses a threat to both traditional, top-down media institutions and organized labor. And maybe we needed that. 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. The economist discusses what the U.S. gets wrong about Putin and the war in Ukraine. Because of the difficulties of working in Iraq and the concerns Iraqis have about their safety, this story presented logistical challenges. THE Roaring '20s was the decade when modern celebrity . The New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm was asked during a libel case how compensation was set. And thats with us all the time, and we have to fight it. The New Yorker is now working out the final details of a contract, and people on both sides appeared optimistic they would reach an agreement this week. [2] Packer's sister, Ann Packer, also is a writer. The ones I talk toand, for various reasons, its an extremely limited poolwant America to leave. Theyve agreed on a $55,000 starting salary and are hashing out issues like caps on potential health care cost increases, people familiar with the talks said even as the Guild threatens a strike. He has done more to pursue social justice than any President since Johnson. It obviously has to do with leadership. Working as the kind of writer that Brooks has sometimes been, but going far beyond that, he takes you into the lives of real Americans, at least one or two of whom will resemble any likely reader of the book, as they discover, sickeningly, that they're ensnared and blocked by forces beyond their . George Packer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, is the author, most recently, of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.. 1. . But its in the bill, its in the law, because fairness demanded it. Almost half a century later, the ghost of the scandal that launched Woodwards career haunts the Trump White House. If you bloc most Americans into identity groups, George Packer says, if you create monoliths, you will end up not speaking to their actual, as people say, lived experience., Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal. Trump threw a great deal of accelerant onto smoldering discontent. Its stuck in its original hierarchy, and that hierarchy has to be overthrown in order for justice to come. 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. "A place in history". For example, do we get rid of standardized testing because there are disparate outcomes between groups? Generationally, hes closest to Clinton. "Long engagements". Its hard to even begin to think how you start reaching a giant chunk of Real America. Its a pretty radical solution, if you think about what it would do to their sales he said. The 96-year-old magazine, known for its revered writers and sophisticated audience, is being consumed by a labor dispute. 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He was a finalist for the 2004 Michael Kelly Award. So, for example, in the COVID-relief bill, theres several billion dollars for disadvantaged farmers. The Depression that ended Fitzgeralds Jazz Age yielded to a new order that might be called the Roosevelt Republic. By George Packer. In Iraq, weve failed as a country. He is best known for his writings for The New Yorker and The Atlantic about U.S. foreign policy and for his book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq.Packer also wrote The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, covering the history of the US from 1978 to 2012.In November 2013, The Unwinding received the . And it says, Were all individuals. We all have a chance to make it. New Yorker staff writer George Packer is the winner of the 2013 National Book Award in Nonfiction for "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America." He reported extensively on the Iraq war, both for the New Yorker and in his 2005 book . Buy on Bookshop. What I hear when I travel these days is hostility not just toward the U.S. government but toward the country and its people. The best way to make it is to get government out of the way and to cut taxes and deregulate and set us free in order to use our industry and talent to make something new. 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. It has set off reflections on their status and revealed the rare bond and unusual deference many of them feel toward Mr. Remnick. 3. If Just America can reform policing, and make our criminal-justice system less barbaric, and close the wealth gap, and close the achievement gap, then Id say all the angst that comes from reading Twitter and the exchange of vitriol that goes on all the time in our culture and in our media will seem trivial. Does Packer think thats viable? Packer argues that seismic economic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, leaving the social contract in pieces and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. And this is also the Democratic Party going along with the Reagan consensus. Or are you making a larger point that, for liberals to achieve something beyond just winning elections, they have to inculcate a sense of patriotism and national spirit? BUT, most of us would like to be able to get health insurance.. At the same time, you may not sell those policies through the frame of specific identities. George Packer on "Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century," by Daniel Oppenheimer. Absolutely. And so, if Smart America is a new aristocracy in which families essentially pass on membership to their children, then its in the end going to be a destructive force, even if a lot of good things have come from it. It seemed like a way to jolt the picture productively. An organizer for the NewsGuild who was present, Nastaran Mohit, told the writers she had avoided involving them in the original organizing drive because she knew how close many of them were to management, and she was worried theyd snitch. We are having history wars at the momentin state legislatures, in school districtsand we are bringing up parts of our history that have been suppressed and that have to be brought to the surface. Or, to be more . In November 2013, The Unwinding received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. An editor there, Daniel Menaker, wrote years later that he was embarrassed about the ineffectuality and yes, ordinariness of the Guild people wed come in contact with, but also that Mr. Shawns conduct had been revealing a classic case of liberals turning to the right when the capitalist chips were down just as I had been told, from my childhood on, liberals usually do.. 40 Lightfoot must have known what was coming on Tuesday because she laid down the race/woman card over the weekend. "Certain folks, frankly, don't support us in leadership roles." ++++ She does know that Chicago isn't even a majority-white city, right? But it seems to me to come out of a pre-modern sensibility that goes back to the New Deal. And now its the subject of lawsuits. The stories I tell in the book of Horace Greeley, Frances Perkins, Bayard Rustin, are of progressivesnot quite in the same way that people are today, but certainly reformers, and even radicalswho nonetheless see themselves as working on behalf of the whole country, and trying to bring it together, and trying to hold it to its promises in a way thats generous and not punitive or resentful. And in a way you can see they have followed each other in power from one decade to the next. But Democrats are just as scared. The editor, who is 62, has also said he doesnt plan to follow the example of William Shawn, who ran the magazine until he was nearly 80 and the institution had become a kind of museum of itself. And Obama was also trying to put forward an idea of America that is patriotic, that is aware of its flaws, and that says the arc of history bends toward justice, and so on. Do you think youre more likely to say, when looking back on Just America in this period, Wow, that was a crazy time that many of our institutions on the left went through, and they did a lot of harm, or You know what? No matter what happens, Mr. Remnick told writers on one recent Zoom call, he would not ask them to cross virtual picket lines. The difference is that Gerald Ford, knowing that Vietnam was lost, was politically able to bring refugees here in large numbers and felt morally compelled to do so. Ad Choices. They are as intimate as they are grand, and they offer themselves for worship by ordinary people searching for a suitable object of devotion. His 2021 book Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal describes the fragmentation of American society in recent decades into four mutually antagonistic "four Americas": "Free America" (economically liberal), "Smart America" (educated, affluent and socially liberal), "Real America" (white rural precariat) and "Just America" (urban, progressive and economically disadvantaged). Publish date: January 15, 2008; Language: English; ISBN: 9781436147613; 4.06 (2619 ratings) Regular Price: 29.99 USD. His new book, The Unwinding , depicts an America weakened by . Prior to coming to The Times, Kellogg was editor of LAist.com and the web editor of the public radio show Marketplace. Compared to Iraq or the recession in rural North Carolina, I thought it would be relatively straightforward, Packer said. In this episode, Andrew is joined by George Packer, the author of Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, to explore the four narratives that now dominate American life: Free America, Smart America, Real America, and Just America. There is something sadly touching about this blog post from the New Yorker's George Packer that went up over the weekend (and quickly proceeded to . Thats where its strongest, and at this point its dominant. A deal was finalized late last month. Compare that to the several hundred Iraqisalmost all of them refugees from the Saddam erawho have been allowed to immigrate to the United States over the past few years. There was a rebellion from below within Free America. The Republicans exploited it. member, warned that a strike could last months and do immense damage. . My worry is that the philosophical and practical direction of this movement is making those achievements less likely. But I mean it in a larger sense. Do you know if many Vietnamese felt the same way as these Iraqi translators and others whom we employed and then abandoned? His uncle, George Huddleston, Jr., succeeded to his father's seat in the House of Representatives from 1954 to 1964. Researchers have studied how much of our personality is set from childhood, but what youre like isnt who you are. What am I writing about here?, What he came up with, he explained, is Amazons relation to the world of culture -- especially books.. Packer's maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, Sr., had served eleven successive terms (19151937) representing Alabama's 9th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. Ad Choices. Rosa sat so Martin could walk so Obama could run, so we could all fly. It was a really optimistic picture of incremental but inevitable progress. 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. Robert Siegel discusses President Bush's speech outlining a strategy in the war in Iraq with Reuel Marc Gerecht, contributing editor for the Weekly Standard, Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, former Middle Eastern specialist for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1985 to 1994 and author of The Islamic Paradox: Shiite Clerics, Sunni Fundamentalists, and the Coming of Arab . Joe Biden was elected last year with more votes than any candidate ever, and it doesnt seem to me that he fits into any of these Americas exactly. February 3, 2015. And its also becoming more illiberal. For several years, I have thought that the Iraq War, in its moral atmosphere, more closely resembles the First World War than it does either the Second World War or Vietnam. 2023 Cond Nast. (Ive had a front-row seat to that and continue to at The New York Times, and wrote about the trend last year.). I found my subjects through word of mouth and previous experience. Her passions are breaking up monopolies, regulating corporationsclass struggle, really. His 2005 book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq analyzes the events that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and reports on subsequent developments in that country, largely based on interviews with ordinary Iraqis. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Im in favor of putting together an exit strategy for Iraq, but Im also sure that if we were to leave most of the territory in the near future, the country would erupt in bloodshed of a scope that we havent seen in a long time. Browse archives for February 04, 2015. Remember the slogan when Obama first ran? Unionized employees from Cond Nast marched from New York University to the home of Anna Wintour, Cond Nasts global chief content officer, last Tuesday. Can the rightward forty-five per cent of the country at this point be talked to? We actually kind of like the feeling that we need to continue to earn our place, wrote Mr. Davidson, who is no longer a staff writer but still contributes to The New Yorker. And thats probably an inevitable outcome. June 29, 2021. He said it was misleading. George Packer (born ca. ), None of us want to do anything that could jeopardize the magazine we love. Some salaries at The New Yorker start at $42,000 a year and remain under $60,000 after 20 years on the job. By George Packer. The Gazelle Project -- that was me, Melville Houses Dennis Johnson told Packer. What are celebrities, after all? A labor movement revival began when Gawker employees joined the W.G.A. Really, nihilism is the only word for it. Its as if he didnt experience the late sixties and the seventies in the way, say, Bill Clinton did. I think its exactly the right one. One point of view is that you have to be aware of racism and different identities and different inequalities if you want to take the step of improving everyones life. Its the first time since Free America emerged, in the nineteen-eighties, that weve had a serious new political project as ambitious as thatof simply improving peoples lives in jobs, in working conditions, giving labor more power, breaking up monopolies, providing health care. You say at the end of the book that you dont particularly want to live in any of the four Americas you define. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. Our Man George Packer 2019-05-09 From one of America's greatest non-fiction writers, an epic saga of the rise and fall of American power, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, told through the life of one man. 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