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. Every Friday, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Earlier this week I asked readers if Joe Biden made the right call when he banned energy imports from Russia, acknowledging that doing so would cause gas prices to rise even higher than they were before.

Kyiv is burning. I am struggling to explain this to my young children; they know that I wrote a book about the 2013–14 Ukrainian revolution on the Maidan, Kyiv’s central square. They were too small then to understand that their parents’ friends and colleagues were being shot at by snipers. They do know, though, that I dedicated the book to them, “in hope of a better world to come.

The union of the filmmaker Kogonada and the actor Colin Farrell might not have seemed obvious at first glance. Kogonada’s debut film, the excellent 2017 indie Columbus, is told with quiet remove—the camera is often placed quite a distance away from the lead actors (John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson).

The world was slow to recognize long COVID as one of the most serious consequences of the coronavirus. Six months into the pathogen’s tear across the globe, SARS-CoV-2 was still considered an acute airway infection that would spark a weeks-long illness at most; anyone who experienced symptoms for longer could be expected to be dismissed by droves of doctors.

Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with two women who forged a friendship in crisis. When Sarah’s husband left her for another woman—while she was pregnant—she turned to her colleague Theresa, who was raising a daughter alone.

Perhaps you missed the Taliban’s statement on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “The Islamic Emirate calls for restraint by both parties,” Afghanistan’s new rulers announced on February 25. They emphasized “diplomatic neutrality,” while urging “dialogue” and demanding that “all sides need to desist from taking positions that could intensify violence.

In September 1957—two years after church bells rang in celebration of the new polio vaccine, two years after people rejoiced in the streets, two years after Americans began lining up for their shots—the proportion of children fully vaccinated against polio remained at about 50 percent.Supply was not the problem.