The collapse of Republican resolve in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, 2021, and Trump’s continued designs on power have together ensured that conservatives find it necessary to downplay or dismiss those events as much less than what they were: an assault on American democracy.
This much was predictable. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, my colleague David A.

Few people have derived more profit from a colleague’s superstition than Tim Hallam, a former communications director for the Chicago Bulls. In the spring of 1991, the Bulls were preparing for their first NBA Finals, against Magic Johnson’s aging Lakers, when Hallam approached Michael Jordan, the team’s superstar, to ask him for a kindness.

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.
Question of the Week
Is pornography immoral?
Last week, I wrote an article arguing that the University of Wisconsin should not have fired Joe Gow, the longtime chancellor of its La Crosse campus, for making pornography with his wife.

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Exile has always served as a powerful engine for fiction. To find yourself displaced, whether self-imposed or inflicted by a state, is to be simultaneously inside and outside; you gain intimate proximity to your new society while still standing at a distance from it, seeing things real insiders can’t.

Here’s something we can all agree on: Jack Reacher kicks ass. Kicks it with relish. Kicks it with—not abandon, he’s too in control for that—but with a sense of near-blissful release. Kicks it, most importantly, in the name of justice, in the name of everybody getting what they deserve.
America loved Jack Reacher from the moment it met him. Lee Child, his creator, has written 28 Reacher novels, all of them best sellers. But there’s a special spice, a special piquancy, to our Reacherism right now.

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The GOP has collapsed as a party, but voters in general don’t seem to care about what parties once represented.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Bill Ackman is a brilliant fictional character.

The word indie has lost a lot of its credibility over the years. A term that’s supposed to signal nonconformity is now a bland aesthetic label, evoking microbrews and mason jars. Many supposedly indie institutions have allied with corporations, such as when Pitchfork, the music-reviewing website known for catapulting obscure bands and tearing down big ones, was bought by Condé Nast, the glossy media company, in 2015.

Once upon a time, a restless cashier would eye each and every item you, the consumer, purchased and key it into the register. This took skill but also time—and proved to be an imperfect way to keep track of inventory. Then one day, a group of grocery executives and inventors came up with a better way: what we now know as the barcode, a rectangle that marks items ranging from insulin to Doritos. It’s so ubiquitous and long-lived that it’s become invisible.