Conor Friedersdorf

Last week, Senator Edward Markey published a social-media post seeking interns for his Boston office. He wrote that “BIPOC, LGBTQ+, working class, veterans, and other underrepresented candidates with Massachusetts ties are encouraged to apply.” Outrage quickly followed: Critics treated the post not as a straightforward attempt to encourage diversity in job applications, but rather as a discriminatory signal that white men would be disadvantaged in hiring.

Garrett Langley, the founder and CEO of Flock Safety, is an unlikely spokesperson for the dangers of the surveillance industry: His company says it has deployed more than 120,000 roadside cameras across 49 states. But in August, while defending his products and policies, he perhaps inadvertently showed why Americans should be alarmed by this technology.
Flock caught “a ton” of “bad cops” when it rolled out a tool to identify abuse of its data, Langley acknowledged on the All-In podcast.

In her first argument as a lawyer before the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously quoted the abolitionist Sarah Grimké, who said, “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.” At some point, however, Ginsburg was encouraged to use an alternative to the term sex.
“I’m typing all these briefs and articles for you and the word sex, sex, sex is on every page,” her secretary at Columbia Law School told her.

Last week, the president of the American Anthropological Association weighed in on one of the most polarizing subjects in her field: biological sex. Some anthropologists believe that biological sex is binary, and that it is a necessary and useful category; others believe that this position is at odds with settled science and is a threat to people’s “safety and dignity,” as the AAA put it in an official statement.

After Scott Pelley was fired from 60 Minutes, the longtime CBS News correspondent uttered a single sentence that captured both the greatest fears of the program’s fans and the core grievance of its detractors. Criticizing his new bosses—especially CBS editor in chief Bari Weiss—he said, “There’s a subtle political bias that I’ve never seen at 60 Minutes before, or at CBS News before.

As President Trump prepares to host UFC cage fights on the White House lawn to celebrate 250 years of American democracy and his own 80th birthday, viewers who dig displays of domination will be exhilarated. But why stop at blood sport?
The ratings could be higher if Trump added even more provocative spectacles. Have J. D.

Cigarettes have always been noxious to me: As a kid, I stole my grandpa’s Marlboros and hid them deep in a trash bin. In college, Chesterfields made the kisses of a woman I loved taste carcinogenic. When I lived in Spain, smoky air in my favorite bar made my lungs burn. And no law has spared me more irritation than California’s trailblazing 1990s bans on indoor smoking. Yet I vehemently insist on the right of my fellow humans to smoke.

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After ordering the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani killed in 2020, Donald Trump claimed that the military officer had been “plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel.

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Donald Trump campaigned on the idea that electing him was the best way to avoid wars. He has referred to himself as the “peace president,” going so far as to complain that he hadn’t won a Nobel Peace Prize.

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Today, Donald Trump announced that he is considering using the Insurrection Act to send the U.S. military to Minneapolis if state officials do not quell anti-ICE protests there.

Earlier this year, the United States deported 252 Venezuelans to El Salvador and paid its government to imprison them, despite clear evidence of human-rights abuses in the country’s prison system and forceful warnings that the men would suffer cruel and unusual treatment. Now two human-rights organizations, Human Rights Watch and the Central America–based Cristosal, have found that all of those men were physically abused.

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Barack Obama and Donald Trump have this in common: Both owe their political ascents in part to blunt attacks on leaders who sent America to war.

While out of power, the American right was unified in complaining about the left’s speech policing. Now that Republicans control the White House and Congress, free-speech rights and values are dividing the coalition. One camp thinks Republicans should refrain from policing speech; the other favors policing the left’s speech. The second camp seems ascendant, unfortunately, while the first has failed to turn its beliefs into policy.
The Jimmy Kimmel controversy illustrates the fissure.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, America’s highest-ranking law-enforcement official, declared in an interview posted to YouTube yesterday that federal law enforcement will “go after” Americans for hate speech. “There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech,” she said. In fact, there is no hate-speech exception to the First Amendment.
In a post on X this morning, Bondi tried to qualify her comments.

How many members of Congress, federal judges, governors, attorneys general, and other federal and state leaders have submitted home-loan applications with falsehoods in them?
Too many, I think, to make felons of them all.
The question arises as the Trump administration threatens charges against three prominent Democrats who have angered the president: U.S. Senator Adam Schiff of California, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

Can the city of New York sell groceries more cheaply than the private sector? The mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani thinks so. He wants to start five city-owned stores that will be “focused on keeping prices low” rather than making a profit—what he calls a “public option” for groceries. His proposal calls for opening stores on city land so that they can forgo paying rent or property taxes.
Skeptics have focused on economic obstacles to the plan.

Before Donald Trump ordered the bombing of nuclear sites in Iran, he was warned that, to quote Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, the Constitution does not permit the president “to unilaterally commit an act of war” against a nation that hasn’t first struck America. After the attack, Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland declared Trump’s actions “a clear violation of our Constitution—ignoring the requirement that only the Congress has the authority to declare war.

In Los Angeles, federal agents carrying out deportations on behalf of the Trump administration are clashing with protesters, some lawful, others unlawfully disruptive and even violent. The Trump administration has ordered in the National Guard and threatened to send in the Marines. Governor Gavin Newsom calls this willful escalation.

When Maggie Li Zhang enrolled in a college class where students were told to take notes and read on paper rather than on a screen, she felt anxious and alienated. Zhang and her peers had spent part of high school distance learning during the pandemic.

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Why defend academic freedom even when the ideas in question are wrongheaded or harmful? “It is precisely because any kind of purge opens the gate to all kinds of purge, that freedom of thought necessarily means the freedom to think bad thoughts as well as good.

As the Trump administration rounds up people it alleges to be illegal aliens and gang members, deports them to El Salvador, and pays to imprison them there without convicting them of any crime, constitutional challenges have focused on the Fifth Amendment; the administration appears to have deprived many deportees of liberty without due process.

On Saturday, Elon Musk, the billionaire charged by President Donald Trump with cutting government waste, alerted the public to a massive inefficiency in the federal bureaucracy: Government employees would soon be distracted from their actual work by a request from on high. In aggregate, hundreds of thousands of man-hours would be squandered. But Musk wasn’t putting a stop to this wasteful time suck of a requirement. He was the one imposing it.

Photographs by Alex Welsh
Michael Gollner studies fire and how it behaves at UC Berkeley’s Fire Research Lab. His research is focused on fires that spread from wildlands to urban areas––work that gives him insights into the fires ravaging Pacific Palisades, Altadena, and other areas near Los Angeles. On Friday, I interviewed him about the fires and how to rebuild the communities they’ve destroyed in a way that makes them more resilient. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

Donald Trump’s 2024 victory was about much more than a backlash to left-identity politics. Inflation, among other matters, loomed larger. Still, Trump gained significant ground with Latino, Black, Asian, Arab, Gen Z, and big-city voters. And that, as much as Kamala Harris’s loss, has spurred Democrats to reconsider the role that identity politics plays in their coalition.

More than 530 years after Christopher Columbus led an expedition across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World, many Americans still see the navigator as a symbol of their country’s origins. Others see him as a progenitor of colonialism, enslavement, and genocide. So the day that honors him, the second Monday of October, is unusually polarizing among federal holidays. Just 16 states will observe Columbus Day this year. Some states and many cities instead observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

A heat wave struck Southern California earlier this month. Soon after, large swaths of the region began to burn. All three fires, the Line Fire, the Bridge Fire, and the Airport Fire, are still going.
So far, they’ve engulfed almost 200 square miles, forcing evacuations in four counties and destroying dozens of homes. Southern Californians should know by now that natural disasters threaten our region more than most places in the United States.

As Democrats debate whether to replace President Joe Biden, an ill-conceived argument for retaining him as the nominee is alarmingly common.
Its premise is that Biden has earned voters’ loyalty—as if the question that confronts Americans is what we owe an individual politician rather than what’s best for the country. No matter how one feels about Biden, that premise is deeply flawed.

Last year at Harvard, three Israeli Jews took a course at the Kennedy School of Government. They say that because of their ethnicity, ancestry, and national origin, their professor subjected them to unequal treatment, trying to suppress their speech in class and allowing teaching assistants and classmates to create a hostile climate for Jews.
Afterward, they filed a complaint with Harvard alleging a violation of their civil rights.

As Gavin Newsom rose from mayor of San Francisco to governor of California, he championed progressive efforts to reclassify various felonies as misdemeanors, to end the death penalty, and to legalize marijuana. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, he signed laws barring cops from using a controversial chokehold and requiring independent probes in police shootings, bragging that “California has advanced a new conversation about broader criminal justice reform.

On Sunday at Duke University, the comedian Jerry Seinfeld delivered a commencement address that was, bizarrely, overshadowed in the media by a tiny, nondisruptive protest.
Seinfeld gave a compliment and a warning to his Gen Z audience.
First came the compliment. “I totally admire the ambitions of your generation to create a more just and inclusive society,” he said.