This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. On Mondays, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get Caleb’s writing in your inbox.Perhaps no morpheme has been more crucial to understanding the current cultural moment than meta. I first remember hearing it in high school, an echo across the East River from Brooklyn during the Obama-era hipster boom. On a basic level, meta meant recursive or self-referential—like a warning sign warning you about warning signs or a coffee-table book about coffee tables.
We speak with the chair of the California Reparations Task Force, which is the first in the United States and has just released a landmark report calling for “comprehensive reparations” for Black people harmed by a historical system of state-sanctioned oppression. While the state report is unprecedented, reparations are “first and foremost a federal responsibility,” says attorney Kamilah Moore.
The House committee investigating the deadly January 6 attack on the Capitol will hold its first public hearing on Thursday after 10 months of meeting in private. The hearing will be the first of eight and is expected to draw on roughly 1,000 depositions and interviews.
Russian missiles struck Ukraine’s capital of Kyiv for the first time in over a month on Sunday. This comes as Russian and Ukrainian forces continue to battle over control of the eastern city of Severodonetsk and Russian President Vladimir Putin is warning Western nations against supplying longer-range missile systems to Ukraine.
Conversations about what Americans would tolerate didn’t go too far, underscoring the difficulty of explaining when the pandemic will end.
Since May, there have been more than 700 global cases of monkeypox identified in countries outside West and Central Africa where the virus is endemic.
The CDC is beginning to look at death certificates that indicate more than 100 people who died had long Covid.
The rollout of Covid-19 vaccines to roughly 19 million young children is the last step in making shots available to the entire U.S. population.
One program covers nearly three times as many vaccines today as it did when it was created three decades ago. Despite bipartisan calls for change, Congress has failed to act.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is responsible for safety regulations. It is ill-equipped to enforce them.
Fêted at the World Economic Forum in 2017, Xi Jinping is now accused of torpedoing the global economy with his disastrous Zero Covid strategy.
Open markets aren’t what they used to be. A more complicated, more regional economic system is reshaping the global order.
Despite high inflation, the U.S. is “moving from the strongest economic recovery in modern history to what can be a period of more stable and resilient growth,” Brian Deese said.
On a month-to-month basis, prices rose 0.3% from March to April, a still-elevated rate but the smallest increase in eight months.
Rates this year could reach their highest levels since before the 2008 Wall Street crash if surging prices continue.
The Biden administration this week canceled almost $6 billion in student loan debt for borrowers who attended the now-defunct network of for-profit schools known as Corinthian Colleges, which defrauded thousands of students before being shut down in 2015. We speak to two activists from the Debt Collective, a group working to end the student loan crisis, about the ongoing fight for full federal student debt cancellation.
We speak to San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was elected in 2019 after promising to end cash bail, curb mass incarceration and address police misconduct. He now faces a recall campaign, with opponents blaming rising crime rates on his policies, even though sources like the San Francisco Chronicle report that crime rates have returned to pre-pandemic levels.
As President Biden calls on Congress to enact new gun control measures, we go to Buffalo to speak with Cariol Horne, a racial justice advocate and former Buffalo police officer. She says the nation must address white supremacy, as well as gun control, following last month’s massacre in Buffalo, when a white supremacist attacked a grocery story, fatally shooting 10 people, all of whom were Black.
In a devastating new report, Oxfam says one person is likely dying from hunger every 48 seconds in drought-ravaged Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. We speak with Shannon Scribner, director of humanitarian work at Oxfam America, about how the hunger crisis has worsened since an earlier report was released 10 years ago. She says climate change and the recent war in Ukraine have worsened already dire conditions in East Africa.
Blake Masters also backs “replacement theory.
Buttigieg shoots down Sen. Ted Cruz’s “insane” single entrance strategy to end mass killings at schools.
As Russia and Ukraine remain in a bloody fight over Severodonetsk, a town with a pre-war population of around 100,000 and roughly zero strategic value, another far more important battle is being waged 80 kilometers (50 miles) directly to the west at Dovhen’ke, pre-war population 850.
Former D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone said he didn’t think the hearings would “move the needle” on the public’s thoughts about the insurrection.
Since the Uvalde, Texas and Buffalo, New York murders, mass shootings have continued at the usual pace in America with new versions popping up nearly every day. Also as usual, the rifles used to kill children are seeing skyrocketing sales as gun fans and other buyers seek out those particular models.
The fairytale “The Plot Against the King” erases the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election.
The nation is growing increasingly anxious about inflation, and that’s freaking Democrats out, because everyone knows it’s the party in power that gets blamed for a bad economy. Except this time, maybe there’s something Democrats can do about it: join the majority of Americans who are putting the blame on corporations.
Polling trends suggest that voters don’t believe inflation is President Joe Biden’s fault.
The Louisiana Republican called red flag laws unconstitutional, even after he was told they could have prevented recent deaths in Buffalo.
On Friday, a federal grand jury indicted Peter Navarro for his failure to cooperate with a congressional subpoena issued to him by the Jan. 6 committee back in February. Navarro was disgraced former President Trump’s trade adviser, and while he made some money shilling for his memoir—in which he boasted about all of the conspiratorial work he did in service of thwarting our country’s democracy—he did not want to have to go on the record, so to speak.
On Tuesday’s Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham trotted out one of the Fox News audience’s fave golden oldies: Reefer Madness, baby!
One can imagine your typical Fox News viewer watching the segment late into the night, leering in the direction of his sixth Busch Light with something approaching feral concupiscence. The bleary outline of blonde American banshee Laura Ingraham fires up his once-languorous rods and cones.
“Shut up.