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.
This morning, the FDA granted full approval to the Pfizer vaccine for use in people 16 and older. Although “the vaccine approval was the fastest in the agency’s history,” as The Washington Post noted, serious side effects have proved extremely rare. Nevertheless, anti-vaccine activists—and the politicians and pundits pandering to them—have criticized the accelerated approval process as rushed.
Few observers of global discourse range as widely as Elnathan John, the novelist, satirist, and lawyer who frequently participates online and off in conversations about art, politics, and culture pertaining to at least three continents. His novel, Born on a Tuesday, is a coming-of-age story set in his native Nigeria. In Becoming Nigerian: A Guide, he tried his hand at satire.
After George Floyd’s murder, when sweeping criminal-justice reforms seemed more possible than ever, many Black Lives Matter activists and their allies settled on a rallying cry: “Defund the Police.”That choice was a disaster.
Earlier this month, a California college student passing through Utah wanted to show contempt for a sheriff’s deputy who stopped her friend, so she defiled a pro-police sign. The cop watched, then arrested her.Now she has been charged with a hate crime and faces possible jail time under a bipartisan hate-crime law passed in 2019.
Last week, the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who led The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, was named the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Faculty at its Hussman School of Journalism and Media recommended her for tenure too. But the university’s board of trustees didn’t approve the faculty recommendation. Instead, UNC appointed her to a five-year contract with the option of a tenure review.
Last week, the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who led The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, was named the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Faculty at its Hussman School of Journalism and Media recommended her for tenure too. But the university’s board of trustees didn’t approve the faculty recommendation. Instead, UNC appointed her to a five-year contract with the option of a tenure review.
Erin McLaughlin, an educator in Pennsylvania, believes that, in school and in life, people should study what others think and why. But in her estimation, many educational institutions that purport to value diversity and inclusion fail to treat viewpoint diversity—which she defines as “the recognition that nobody’s worldview is complete, and that no one marker of identity actually defines the way we see the world around us”—as a vital part of civic education.
Deadly police force may be most traumatic to a community when officers kill a child. No matter the circumstances, we mourn both today’s loss and the decades of forgone tomorrows. The blow is sharper still when the child’s killing is captured on video and replayed again and again. Most recently, the police killings of Adam Toledo, 13, in Chicago in late March, and Ma’Khia Bryant, 16, last month in Columbus, Ohio, sparked protests and a social-media outcry.
Aviation deaths once looked like an intractable problem. Then the federal government began probing every plane crash with an eye toward preventing future loss of life. Our skies got much safer as a result. A similar approach could reduce police killings. A federal agency should investigate every single killing and significant injury caused by American police officers, who have long killed people at higher rates than cops in many other wealthy democracies.
Ndona Muboyayi wants to improve the education that public-school children, including her son and daughter, receive in Evanston, Illinois, where her mother’s family history goes back five generations.