This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely, intriguing conversations and solicits reader responses to one question of the moment. Every Friday, he publishes some of your most thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Earlier this week I asked, “What should be done about medical misinformation, if anything? Why?” I noted that one faction wants to take action against it while another wants institutions to stay viewpoint-neutral and allow all perspectives to be aired.Carol argues that the stakes are high:
Medical misinformation is contributing to America’s growing death toll, now passing 900,000. It’s a matter of life and death.
Earlier this week I asked, “What should be done about medical misinformation, if anything? Why?” I noted that one faction wants to take action against it while another wants institutions to stay viewpoint-neutral and allow all perspectives to be aired.Carol argues that the stakes are high:
Medical misinformation is contributing to America’s growing death toll, now passing 900,000. It’s a matter of life and death.
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, many countries have passed or invoked laws against misinformation. In the United States, content distributors like Spotify and social-media platforms like Twitter are under pressure from one faction to take action against medical misinformation and from another faction to stay viewpoint-neutral and allow all perspectives to be aired.
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.Earlier this week, I asked for your thoughts on racial preferences in college admissions. For context, Pew found in 2019 that “most Americans (73%) say colleges and universities should not consider race or ethnicity when making decisions about student admissions. Just 7% say race should be a major factor in college admissions, while 19% say it should be a minor factor.
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.Late last month, the Supreme Court agreed to hear two cases about the constitutionality of race-conscious admissions policies, often called affirmative action, in institutions of higher education. What are your thoughts, positions, insights, questions, or legal opinions on the subject?Email your answers to conor@theatlantic.com. I’ll publish a selection of answers in Friday’s newsletter.
Earlier this week I asked readers, “What do you think about artificial wombs? Are they ethical? Desirable? Should they be a priority for scientists? If they become advanced enough to be viable, would you ever use one? How would a world in which they were available differ from ours?
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.What do you think about artificial wombs? Are they ethical? Desirable? Should they be a priority for scientists? If they become advanced enough to be viable, would you ever use one? How would a world in which they were available differ from ours? Any thoughts on this subject are welcome.Email your answers to conor@theatlantic.com. I’ll publish a selection of answers in Friday’s newsletter.
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.“You can appoint any American citizen to one term as president,” I wrote earlier this week, “so long as your choice has never run for president before. Who do you appoint to the White House and why?” Among politicians, Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, was mentioned most. Former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and former Georgia State Representative Stacey Abrams were tapped, too.
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.“You can appoint any American citizen to one term as president,” I wrote earlier this week, “so long as your choice has never run for president before. Who do you appoint to the White House and why?” Among politicians, Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, was mentioned most. Former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and former Georgia State Representative Stacey Abrams were tapped, too.
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.In 2024, you can appoint any American citizen to one term as president, so long as your choice has never run for president before. Who do you appoint to the White House, and why would you choose them? What would you expect to be their biggest contribution and their biggest failure? Email answers to conor@theatlantic.com. I’ll publish a selection of answers in Friday’s newsletter. If you aren’t subscribed, sign up here.
In November, when the Biden administration imposed a federal coronavirus-vaccine mandate on all employers with 100 or more workers, it did so through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a federal agency that Congress created in the early 1970s to ensure safe working conditions. Now the Supreme Court has blocked OSHA’s action, ruling that the agency lacked the authority to order large employers to require all workers to be vaccinated or frequently tested.
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.Earlier this week I asked you all, “What are the proper roles of parents and teachers, respectively, in the education of children?” What follows are three very different answers to that question.
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.Greetings! Before tackling today’s main subject, a prompt for an issue I hope to air later this week.What are the proper roles of parents and teachers, respectively, in the education of children? What conflict between a parent and a teacher would leave you most torn about how to resolve it? If you’ve experienced a parent-teacher conflict, describe it, how you approached it, and how things ended. My email address is conor@theatlantic.com.
For most of this century, America’s debate about policing took place against a backdrop of falling murder rates. But in 2020, the U.S. murder rate rose 30 percent from 2019. Now the earliest figures from 2021 are in––and in many cities murders are still rising.These are uncomfortable facts for those of us who argue against the “tough on crime” excesses of the 1980s and ’90s.
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.As the Omicron stage of the pandemic wears on, many of you are anxious, frustrated, and incredulous or even despairing as to how others are behaving––but you’re not of like mind. Some of you believe that the response to the new variant is overwrought, while others think that it is underwhelming.
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.Question of the WeekThe holiday break is over for most. How should America’s colleges, high schools, and elementary schools handle the winter surge of COVID-19 cases associated with the Omicron variant? What do you like most or least about how your educational institution is handling the pandemic? What local details of interest can you share about how matters are being handled near you? As ever, my email address is conor@theatlantic.com.
Updated at 7:30 p.m. ET on December 22, 2021Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.This week there’s new information in a long-running debate.For more than a decade I’ve opposed U.S. drone-war policies. Calling drone strikes “surgical” was Orwellian propaganda, I argued. I later urged a drone-strike moratorium due to repeated massacres of innocents, among other reasons.
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.Earlier this week, I highlighted a debate about the merits of the Slow Food movement and asked readers to share any contested opinion about food or foodstuffs that they happen to hold.Some correspondents took aim at particular foods. “Green beans are chalky garbage,” Molly asserted, “and no, I don’t think that just because I haven’t had them the way you prepare them.
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.Question of the Week: Food for ThoughtThis week I want to know your most contested opinion on food. Do you eat meat? Hate cheese? Are you a vegetarian or a vegan? Is organic produce worth it or a waste of money? Do you care if crops are genetically modified? Would you eat veal? Octopus? Whale? How much do you tip in restaurants? This is your chance to share any and all food-related opinions, even those not captured in the preceding questions.
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.Earlier this week I curated some nuanced commentary on abortion and solicited your thoughts on the same subject. What follows includes perspectives from several different sides of the debate. I hope each one informs your thinking, even if only about how some other people think.We begin with a personal reflection.Cheryl was 16 when New York State passed a statute legalizing abortion and 19 when Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.Conversations of NoteAbortion has been discussed intensely this past week due to oral arguments in a Supreme Court case that could significantly alter the constitutional right to the procedure in the United States. At issue is a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, contra current precedent. If upheld, the law will likely inspire new abortion restrictions in many red states.
Sign up for Conor’s newsletter here.I once hoped that Facebook and Twitter would enable better conversations among strangers trying to think through our complicated world together. And I’ve learned a lot and interacted with wonderful people on social media. But many of the most thoughtful people I know no longer engage there. It is too hostile, too time-consuming, and too influenced by outrage and bad actors. Let’s converse here instead.
Last weekend, Pope Francis gave my profession a gift: a thoughtful outsider’s perspective on the proper role of journalists. “Your mission is to explain the world, to make it less obscure, to make those who live in it less afraid of it and look at others with greater awareness, and also with more confidence,” he said, adding that, to succeed, journalists must first listen.By this, he meant far more than picking up a telephone or jumping onto Zoom.
Last week, during a White House press briefing on COVID-19, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky urged Americans to get jabs for their kids. “We know that vaccination helps to decrease community transmission,” she said, “and protect those who are most vulnerable.”Her message was succinct, accurate, and easy to understand. But it was at odds with new guidance from the American Medical Association and the Association of American Medical Colleges.
Donald Trump is trying to hang on as the doddering boss of the Republican Party. Earlier this month, he threatened that his supporters may stay home in 2022 and 2024 unless others in the GOP validate his delusion that he beat Joe Biden.Were the GOP base less easily duped, it would move on, as when George H. W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney lost White House bids. As president, Trump failed to build his border wall or bring home the troops.
Updated at 4:50 p.m ET on October 20, 2021. Have you ever wondered what deans of diversity do behind closed doors? Until last week, the public had little visibility into their methods. Then covertly recorded audio emerged of Yaseen Eldik, Yale Law School’s director of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and Ellen Cosgrove, an associate dean, pressuring a student to issue a written apology for emailing out a party invitation that offended some of his classmates.
Large swaths of America’s vaccinated masses—along with elites in the White House, boardrooms, public schools, hospitals, and the mainstream media—are feeling frustrated with their unvaccinated neighbors. And understandably so. COVID-19 vaccines offer stellar protection against hospitalization and death.
COVID-19, one of the most formidable viral foes that the world has faced in a century, has caused more than 4.5 million deaths. The United States and nearly every other country besides were correct to declare it a public-health emergency. But now federal, state, and local officials are grappling with when to end the temporary emergencies declared in early 2020, in many cases with the expectation that they’d last just weeks. The U.S.
Privacy is a set of curtains drawn across the windows of our lives. And technology companies are moths that will chew through more of the fabric every year if we let them, and especially if we encourage them.An American who stores accumulated photographs in a spare bedroom or attic or self-storage space correctly presumes that those albums of visual keepsakes are off-limits to other people.