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. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, I asked OpenAI’s GPT-3 AI chatbot what I should ask all of you about AI.
In a legislature awash with former prosecutors, Rep. Jasmine Crockett is one of the few members of Congress who has defended those unable to afford a lawyer.
The California Republican failed in three votes to secure a majority, opening the door to more challengers.
Pity the poor astronomer. Biologists can hold examples of life in their hands. Geologists can fill specimen cabinets with rocks. Even physicists get to probe subatomic particles in laboratories built here on Earth. But across its millennia-long history, astronomy has always been a science of separation. No astronomer has stood on the shores of an alien exoplanet orbiting a distant star or viewed an interstellar nebula up close.
For the past two years, Washington has been under the unified control of the Democratic Party. It has also been under the control of a narrow demographic: longtime recipients of Social Security. The ruling troika of Nancy Pelosi (age 82), Chuck Schumer (72), and Joe Biden (80) has participated in politics for about a combined 140 years. The last time one of them had a job that wasn’t based on Pennsylvania Avenue was 1987.
Six years of Donald Trump’s tax returns were released by a House committee on Friday after a years-long legal battle by the former president to keep them sealed. Early revelations include the finding that Trump paid just $750 in federal income tax during his first year in office in 2017, and he paid no tax in 2020.
In Brazil, former union leader and head of the Workers’ Party Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was inaugurated Sunday for his third term as the country’s president, replacing far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. Lula served as Brazil’s most popular president from 2003 to 2010 and helped lift tens of millions of Brazilians out of poverty.
Sanders’ well-chronicled antagonism toward lobbyists has some concerned they’ll be unable to blunt criticism of their clients’ profits or corporate executive salaries.
While antiviral pills are plentiful and remain an option for some with weak immune systems, they won’t work for everyone — Pfizer’s Paxlovid interacts with many widely prescribed drugs.
Reviews by outside experts and internal officials found serious flaws in the nation’s food-inspection programs after four infant hospitalizations and two deaths were linked to infant formula. But the FDA is still processing the recommendations.
An Arizona court has ruled that abortion doctors cannot be prosecuted under a pre-statehood law that criminalizes nearly all abortions yet was barred from being enforced for decades.
Now some states are making pandemic rules permitting booze-to-go and delivery permanent.
The panels began investigating Aduhelm’s approval and pricing in June 2021, just weeks after it won the FDA’s backing despite questions about the drug’s clinical benefit to patients.
Who left his pair of genuine-leather holsters,
Tooled for cowboy cap guns, outside in the rain?
A question my father had to contend with one morning
Some seventy summers ago in Missouri.
He stood in the driveway, late for the office,
Seersucker jacket over one arm,
And weighed his options.
Even with last month’s further easing of inflation, the Federal Reserve plans to keep raising interest rates.
We look at a remarkable film that follows how acclaimed playwright Liza Jessie Peterson gave a mesmerizing performance of her one-person play “The Peculiar Patriot” at the Louisiana State Penitentiary known as Angola, before authorities stopped it halfway through.
In 2022, more jails in the United States became death traps, as people faced inhumane conditions in overcrowded facilities amid a lack of mental healthcare, housing and backlash against bail reform. Most of those who died were incarcerated pretrial, and activists say this number is heavily underreported. From New York City to Houston, Texas, jail deaths have reached their highest levels in decades.
In a remarkable development, New York Democrats look likely to defeat Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul’s nomination of Hector LaSalle to be the state’s next chief judge, after progressives raised concern about his conservative judicial record and anti-abortion, anti-labor and anti-bail reform positions.
Donald Trump’s eldest son was ripped by outgoing GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger and others over the clip.
The “prospects don’t look good,” the economist warned in his New York Times column.
Hey there, I hope you got every present you wanted, that all your friends and family are well, and that you have a warm cup of something laced with pumpkin pie spice close at hand. Because this may be the gloomiest, soot-stained story to come down your chimney this holiday season.
UPDATE: Monday, Jan 2, 2023 · 5:54:08 PM +00:00
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Barbara Morrill
In case you missed it, a related post from Mark Sumner:
Ukraine update: 10 moments from a war that already contains a million unforgettable moments
Over 10 months, the Russo-Ukraine War has killed over 200,000 on both sides and leveled entire cities to the ground, with consequences reaching far beyond Ukraine’s border.
Incoming House Majority Leader Steve Scalise sent a letter Friday to the Republican conference outlining the agenda for the first few weeks of the session of the Republicans’ tiny new majority. That is, if they can actually get a speaker elected, because they can’t do any business at all until that’s accomplished.
Everyone who knew Ken Balcomb—the great whale scientist who died this week at age 82 after a long struggle with cancer—has stories to tell about him, often many of them. My favorite is one that he liked to tell sometimes, but that other people I know witnessed on several different occasions.
The transcript is part of a mass database of evidence released by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
After an investigation into the inhumane conditions at the facility, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Florida activists demand that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) cancel its contract with the Baker County Sheriff’s Office.
This article was originally published at Prism.
In November, a group of incarcerated women at Baker County Detention Center in Macclenny, Florida, filed a Prison Rape Elimination Act complaint with the ACLU of Florida.
The Jan. 6 House select committee released a text message exchange between Hicks and another White House staffer on the day of the U.S. Capitol riot.
The former Trump adviser told his aide he would “surround the Capitol in total silence” after Biden’s inauguration, according to the House panel investigation.
We continue our Democracy Now! special broadcast with Democracy Now! co-host Juan González, who recently gave three “farewell” speeches in his hometown of New York before he moved to Chicago. González is an award-winning journalist and investigative reporter who spent 29 years as a columnist for the New York Daily News.
In a Democracy Now! special broadcast, we spend the hour with our own Juan González, who recently gave three “farewell” speeches in his hometown of New York before he moved to Chicago. González is an award-winning journalist and investigative reporter who spent 29 years as a columnist for the New York Daily News.