On July 17th, former President Obama delivered the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, in Johannesburg. The lecture came not long after Donald Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. The talk was Obama’s most extensive reflection so far on the current political climate, though it did not once mention Trump by name. The lecture is edited, but not much.—David Remnick
On Tuesday, when Barack Obama walked onto a stage in Johannesburg to deliver the 2018 Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture, commemorating the centenary of the former South African President’s birth, he offered the sharpest possible contrast between himself and his successor—between statesman and demagogue—and, crucially, the distinction between a man who grasps history as the living context of our lives and one unburdened by the knowledge of how we arrived at the present and what that means for the future.
tinfoilparachute 