Conor Friedersdorf

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.

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.

Last month, a public-school district that serves mostly elementary and middle-school students in Evanston, Illinois, held its third annual Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action—using a curriculum, created in collaboration with Black Lives Matter activists and the local teachers’ union, that introduces children as young as 4 and 5 to some of America’s most complex and controversial subjects.

Chloé Valdary is the founder of Theory of Enchantment, a diversity and resilience training company that the 27-year-old African American entrepreneur runs from Downtown Brooklyn.

Jonathan TwingleyIf 2020 were a person, what sort of punishment would they deserve? And given the sensible prohibitions against torture in human-rights law, what would be the next best option?The conceit of personifying a year dates back to at least the ancient Greeks and, in American newspaper culture, to the early 20th century, when the cartoonist J. C. Leyendecker established a tradition of drawing New Year’s babies on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.

GETTY / THE ATLANTICThe journalist Matthew Yglesias, a co-founder of Vox, announced today that he is leaving that publication for the paid-newsletter platform Substack, so that he can enjoy more editorial independence.The move may prove a good fit for Yglesias, who began his career as a highly successful independent blogger before blogging at The Atlantic and then elsewhere.

When the news began circulating on social media, many couldn’t believe it was true––that the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California would remove a longtime professor from a class because a Mandarin word he used correctly in a lesson sounded sort of like a racial slur. One skeptic warned that the “ridiculous sounding story” seemed like a “fabricated Reddit meme.

Hundreds of academics in the linguistics community signed an open letter earlier this month attacking Steven Pinker, one of their field’s most prominent scholars, for six tweets and a passage from one of his best-selling books. Whatever their intentions, they were never going to succeed in intimidating the famous, tenured Harvard professor. But they did send a message to less powerful scholars that certain opinions, publicly stated, could result in professional sanction.

When I was 21, the United States experienced a national trauma: the planes crashing into the World Trade Center, the nearly 3,000 people killed in that day’s terrorist attacks, the ruins left smoldering for months at Ground Zero, and the unnerving knowledge that sooner or later, al-Qaeda would almost certainly strike again. Thoughtful deliberation is never so difficult as in such moments.