Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, I asked, “What roles should ‘color-blindness’ and race-consciousness play in personal interactions?”Replies have been edited for length and clarity.
At some point during the winter of 1609–10, in Jamestown, Virginia, the starving English settlers are said to have begun eating one another. Meanwhile, back in London, the King James Version of the Bible, arguably the greatest work of prose in the English language, was receiving its final edits; it went to the printer the following year.
As the COVID-19 era pause on federal student debt payments comes to an end and some 40 million Americans will resume payments next month, we speak with Debt Collective organizer Astra Taylor about Biden’s new Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, plan and her organization’s new tool that helps people apply to the Department of Education to cancel the borrower’s debt.
On the 50th anniversary of the U.S.-backed military coup in Chile that deposed democratically elected socialist leader Salvador Allende, we discuss the U.S. contribution to the coup and declassified records obtained by the National Security Archive’s Chile Documentation Project with Peter Kornbluh. His book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, has been revised and published in Chile for the first time.
As the G20 met in India this weekend, invitations to dinners during the G20 used the name Bharat instead of India. Bharat is a Sanskrit term which is already India’s second official name but is not widely used internationally.
We get an update on the G20 summit, which welcomed the African Union as a permanent member and took place for the first time in India as the country faces criticism for bulldozing slums near the site of the meeting.
The infectious disease expert said he does not expect to see a federal mask mandate.
The Biden administration and drugmaker Danco on Friday appealed a lower court ruling restricting access to the pills
About 100 million Americans deal with medical debt, late notices, threatening voicemails and credit score declines.
A super PAC affiliate is spending $13 million far ahead of the normal advertising timeline.
The president leaned into his achievements at a Labor Day event in Philadelphia, but a new poll reflects widespread disapproval.
“It’s a complicated relationship,” she said of the U.S. and China.
The unemployment rate rose from 3.5 percent to 3.8 percent, the highest level since February 2022 though still low by historical standards.
About 3 million children could lose child care after funding expires at the end of next month.
We look at the dire conditions inside the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, where Donald Trump and his 18 co-defendants were recently booked. Ten prisoners have now died in the jail’s custody just this year — the latest on Sunday. Shawndre Delmore had been incarcerated pretrial for five months before he was found unresponsive in a cell on August 31.
In a unanimous decision, Mexico’s Supreme Court issued a historic ruling Wednesday decriminalizing abortion on the federal level. While laws banning the procedure are still in place in a majority of Mexican states, people in those states can now receive abortions at federal medical facilities run the country’s public health system, and states will be barred from penalizing those patients and providers.
Greene, a close ally of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, wrote the message on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Republicans are holding up a two-decade effort called PEPFAR, which aims to fight HIV and AIDS globally, because they want to add abortion-related restrictions.
The two-term New Jersey governor has been the coup-attempting former president’s most strident critic on the 2024 GOP campaign trail
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Sam Bankman-Fried won people over through his reputation as a civically minded progressive. Last week, an FTX executive who cut a different figure—that of a “budding Republican mega-donor”—pleaded guilty to two charges ahead of his former boss’s trial.
Judge Tanya Chutkan is known for handing down some of the toughest sentences to people who stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Trump advisers are planning to pair corporate tax cuts with a 10% tariff. Democrats are pouncing.
Matt Warshaw still remembers the jolt of horror he felt when the camera went up. It was September 2000, a decade since he quit his job as the editor of Surfing magazine and fled the crowded breaks of Southern California for the cold, isolated waves of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. When he saw the cam on the flagpole at a beachfront house his friend was renting, he was livid, certain that the website it broadcast to, Surfline, would bring crowds to his favorite spot.
When a group of German hackers breached a Tesla, they weren’t out to remotely seize control of the car. They weren’t trying to access the owner’s WiFi passwords, nor did they want a way to steal credit-card numbers from a local electric-vehicle charging network.Their target was its heated seats.The Tesla in question was equipped with heated rear seats, but the feature is hidden behind a paywall and activated only after the driver forks over $300. To get around that, three Ph.D.
The agency’s decision on Monday sets up shots to be rolled out later this month.
One evening in September 2022, a group of Ukrainian sea drones sped out into the Black Sea, heading for Russian-occupied Crimea. Their designers—engineers who had been doing other things until the current war began—had carefully targeted the fast, remote-controlled, explosive-packed vessels to hit ships anchored in Sebastopol, the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.
We look at the 50th anniversary of what is sometimes called the “other 9/11” — the U.S.-backed coup in Chile, when General Augusto Pinochet ousted President Salvador Allende and inaugurated almost two decades of brutal military rule. Allende died in the presidential palace on September 11, 1973, marking the end of Chile’s first socialist government.
We get an update from Morocco, which has declared three days of mourning after the strongest earthquake to hit the region in at least a century. About 2,500 people died in the 6.8-magnitude earthquake that struck the country on Friday, with another 2,500 injured and the death toll expected to rise. The epicenter was in the High Atlas Mountains located about 44 miles from Marrakech, where many villages remain largely inaccessible and lack both electricity and running water.
The Biden administration and drugmaker Danco on Friday appealed a lower court ruling restricting access to the pills
About 100 million Americans deal with medical debt, late notices, threatening voicemails and credit score declines.