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 readers for their thoughts on Donald Trump’s legal troubles in New York.Diana is tired of hearing about Trump:
I was so happy when there was a short period where that guy wasn’t on the front page.
The ramifications from Friday’s decision for the FDA and the drug industry could be felt for decades.
For the past three months, Israelis have been protesting across the country against the attempted overhaul of their judicial system by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-right coalition. In February, a survey found that nearly one in five Israelis had taken part in a demonstration. This unprecedented activism culminated in a national strike at the end of March that compelled Netanyahu to pause, but not abandon, his efforts to push through the legislation.
Technologically speaking, we live in a time of plenty. Today, I can ask a chatbot to render The Canterbury Tales as if written by Taylor Swift or to help me write a factually inaccurate autobiography. With three swipes, I can summon almost everyone listed in my phone and see their confused faces via an impromptu video chat. My life is a gluttonous smorgasbord of information, and I am on the all-you-can-eat plan.
We look at how racial disparities in healthcare treatment and access will shape the impact of anti-abortion rulings with Dr. DeShawn Taylor, an OB-GYN physician, abortion provider and owner of Desert Star Family Planning in Phoenix — the only Black-owned independent abortion provider in the border state of Arizona. Her upcoming book is Undue Burden: A Black Woman Physician on Being Christian and Pro-Abortion in the Reproductive Justice Movement.
We look at access to medical abortion pills and advice on how to manage abortions at home with Dr. Linda Prine, physician and co-founder of the Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline. Prine says the hotline is increasingly busy and now has 70 clinicians taking calls for 18 hours each day.
When U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled Friday the Food and Drug Administration’s two-decade old approval of the leading abortion drug mifepristone violates the law, he cited the 19th century Comstock Act, a so-called anti-vice law that prohibits the mailing of contraceptives and instruments or drugs that can be used in an abortion. It has been dormant for half a century. We speak to Lauren MacIvor Thompson, a historian of birth control, about the Comstock Act and its legacy.
We look at the dueling rulings by two federal judges on the abortion pill mifepristone. A Trump-appointed judge in Texas suspended the Food and Drug Administration’s decades-old approval of the drug, while a judge in Washington state ordered the agency to maintain the status quo. Jessica Mason Pieklo, executive editor of Rewire News Group, says the judicial assault on reproductive health is “a constitutional crisis” that requires urgent attention.
We speak with Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, about the ruling by a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas to revoke the Food and Drug Administration approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. Shortly after the Texas ruling, a federal judge in Washington ordered the FDA to keep mifepristone on the market and maintain the status quo. The Justice Department has appealed the Texas ruling.
The Biden administration swiftly appeals abortion pill ruling as Dems split on going further.
A Texas judge’s preliminary ruling invalidating the FDA’s approval of the abortion pill could make it harder for patients to get abortions even in states where it remains legal.
Jerome Powell “stepped up and took a flamethrower to the regulations,” the senator said.
The government said prices increased 0.4% last month, just below January’s 0.5% rise.
“I can’t think of a time when there’s been greater uncertainty,” the president said.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failed to report frequent luxury trips paid for by a billionaire Republican megadonor named Harlan Crow, leading to renewed calls for the conservative jurist’s impeachment. According to ProPublica, Thomas has for decades accepted flights on Crow’s private jet, trips on his yacht and frequent stays at his exclusive lakeside resort, in apparent violation of a law requiring justices and other federal officials to disclose most gifts.
Israel has bombed southern Lebanon and Gaza as tension soars in the region days after Israeli police repeatedly attacked Palestinian worshipers inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem. In response to the raids on the mosque, militants in southern Lebanon and Gaza fired dozens of rockets into Israel. It was the largest rocket attack from Lebanon in 17 years.
We speak with Justin Jones, one of two Black Democratic lawmakers expelled by a Republican supermajority in the Tennessee state House of Representatives Thursday for peacefully protesting gun violence in the chamber last week as thousands rallied at the Capitol to demand gun control after the Covenant elementary school shooting in Nashville. A vote to expel their white colleague who joined them in solidarity failed.
We speak with award-winning journalist and author Jeff Sharlet, who has spent the last decade reporting on the growing threat of fascism across the United States. In his new book, The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, Sharlet says the language of “civil war” has become central to right-wing rhetoric, mainstreamed by former President Donald Trump, Congressmember Marjorie Taylor Greene and other Republicans.
This article contains spoilers through the third episode of Succession Season 4. He is … not risen?I think? For three-plus seasons, Logan Roy has ducked and weaved his way past near fatalities—a hemorrhagic stroke, multiple corporate coup attempts, a congressional investigation, a troublesome UTI, a collapse in the Hamptons—like a hirsute, cashmere-clad Road Runner. Hostile board meeting? Meep meep. Attempted patricidal veto under the Tuscan sun? Fuck off.
Two expelled Black Democratic lawmakers in Tennessee say they want to be reappointed, then elected back to their seats.
The California governor told former White House press secretary Jen Psaki that DeSantis’ policies make it clear Republicans “don’t care” about children.
Democrats “want him to be the nominee because he is the weakest of the Republican candidates,” said Donald Trump’s former attorney general.
Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, expelled by Republicans for joining a protest against gun violence, said they have always felt unwelcome at the state Capitol.
The nation’s top health official says a court ruling threatening the availability of a main drug used in medication abortion was “not America.
Victim advocates were caught off guard by the news.
When Molly Shannon auditioned for Saturday Night Live in the mid-’90s, she received some appallingly bad advice. A scout warned her against doing the character Mary Katherine Gallagher—a geeky teenager who stuck her hands in her armpits and smelled them when she got nervous—because the show’s executive producer, Lorne Michaels, wouldn’t like it. “He’ll think it’s weird, that dirty little character,” Shannon recalled being told.
The chaos unleashed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade was underscored on Friday when federal judges released dueling opinions on mifepristone, a pill used in more than half of abortions in the United States. In a suit by 17 progressive states and the District of Columbia, Judge Thomas O. Rice of the Eastern District of Washington State ordered the FDA to preserve access to mifepristone. In a competing ruling from Texas, Judge Matthew J.
“What you saw by that one judge in that one court in that one state — that’s not America,” Xavier Becerra said.
You know something strange is afoot when Elon Musk comes out in favor of tech regulation. Or when Kevin McCarthy and a left-wing Joe Biden appointee agree that one particular issue is a priority. These are not people who tend to agree on, well, anything. But such are the nascent, topsy-turvy politics of artificial intelligence.AI is not really a single issue you can be for or against the way you can with, say, guns or abortion.
