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, “What’s been your experience with the health-care system and what lessons have you drawn?”Dennis kicks us off with a near-death experience:
I was young and foolish.
Tomorrow, the U.S. Department of Energy is expected to announce that the era of fusion power is finally upon us: Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, have generated energy with a controlled nuclear fusion reaction. It has already been hailed as a transformative moment, even as the nature and reality of that transformation are nigh-impossible to discern.
The extremist Georgia lawmaker responded that the White House “needs to learn how sarcasm works.
The world of cryptocurrency is rich with eccentric characters and anonymous Twitter personalities. So perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the early figures who called attention to the problems with Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, is a 30-year-old Michigan psychiatrist who investigates financial crimes as a hobby.James Block, who runs a crypto newsletter called Dirty Bubble Media, has gotten overlooked in the swift and spectacular collapse of FTX.
This article contains spoilers through the Season 2 finale of The White Lotus.In an interview with NPR’s Fresh Air last week, the writer and director Mike White suggested that his hit HBO series The White Lotus had less in common with most prestige TV dramas than with the network shows of his youth: Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, Laverne & Shirley. I appreciate his lack of pomposity, but this is total stronzata, as one of the artichoke-wielding di Grasso women might say.
We look at “Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power,” a remarkable new documentary that shows how a small rural community in Alabama organized during the civil rights movement to challenge white supremacy and systematic disenfranchisement of Black residents, and would become, in some ways, the first iteration of the Black Panther Party.
We feature excerpts from activists from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus who were honored Saturday at the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, a rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who just days earlier vowed that his war in Ukraine would be a “long process” with no clear end in sight. Jan Rachinsky accepted on behalf of the Russian civil rights group Memorial, which was shuttered by the government last year.
The Coronavirus Crisis committee lays out 30 recommendations for protecting the country during future pandemics.
The move to authorize the shots comes as Covid-19 infections in the U.S. tick up amid the most intense flu season in years.
Public frustration with the restrictions appears to have finally swayed the opinion of officials.
The team overseeing licensed vaccines is overwhelmed by high turnover and a pandemic-induced backlog of inspections.
Inflation has cooled only slightly and job growth remains strong.
A new POLITICO-Morning Consult poll suggests voters’ views of the economy are baked in.
Housing investment, though, plunged at a 26 percent annual pace, hammered by surging mortgage rates.
According to an NBC News poll released Sunday, 70 percent of registered voters expressed interest in the upcoming election as a “9” or “10” on a 10-point scale.
We speak with Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, about the campaign to hold Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman responsible for the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This week a U.S.
Brittney Griner’s release from Russia has brought renewed attention to the notorious Russian arms dealer whom the U.S. exchanged for the basketball star in a prisoner swap. Viktor Bout, the former Soviet military officer who became known as the “Merchant of Death,” was serving a 25-year prison sentence in the United States for conspiracy to commit terrorism.
Basketball star Brittney Griner landed in the United States early Friday after nearly 10 months of detention in Russia. Griner was freed Thursday in a dramatic prisoner swap between the United States and Russia, with the Biden administration agreeing to free Viktor Bout, a convicted Russian arms dealer who was serving a 25-year sentence.
The Supreme Court is considering a North Carolina redistricting case that could have far-reaching implications for voting rights in the 2024 election and beyond. At stake in Moore v. Harper is whether North Carolina Republican lawmakers had the authority to overturn a state Supreme Court ruling that redrew the state’s congressional map due to partisan gerrymandering.
Just a day after The New York Times published an odiously misleading story pretending that Twitter owner Elon Musk’s politics were any more complicated than the “own the libs” far-right chuddery the man so relentlessly promotes, Musk apparently decided that he’d been too subtle in his views.
UPDATE: Sunday, Dec 11, 2022 · 10:37:51 PM +00:00 · kos
If you are regular readers of our Ukraine coverage, you should know better than to hyperventilate over Bakhmut. While there’s been talk about some Russian gains around the town, Def Mon puts it all in perspective in this thread:
Bakhmut These images shows the RU progress in the Bakhmut area for the last 3 months. Can we all calm down now? 2022-08-31 vs 2022-12-11 pic.twitter.
Conservatives have suddenly made ex-Marine Paul Whelan’s release a cause célèbre—mainly because a Democratic president just freed a Black lesbian woman in a one-for-one prisoner swap, and the optics on the story are too promising for this bevy of bigots to pass up.
The 40,000-plus North Carolinians who have been without power since Saturday because someone knocked out the power grid in Moore County have largely been restored to service now, thanks to workers at Duke Energy who scrambled to replace the equipment destroyed in what has all the earmarks of a domestic terrorist attack. The investigation into the attacks continues apace, with the FBI issuing search warrants both for individuals and for cell phone data.
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Are you still pumped about Tuesday night’s thunderous win in Georgia? I sure am! And you better believe I’m not tired of winning. In fact, I’m ready to win some more. And there’s a golden opportunity just around the corner.
Unfortunately, abortion rights in Virginia are hanging by a thread—but we can drive a stake into the GOP’s plan to restrict abortion in just a month’s time.
The GOP lawmaker suggested she would have done a better job leading the armed insurrection.
“He was not particularly interested in Paul’s case in the way that one would have thought he would be,” Fiona Hill said after Trump criticized the prisoner swap.
If there’s one tweet that will tell you everything you need to know about Elon Musk, it’s this one from early this morning:
My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2022In five words, Musk manages to mock transgender and nonbinary people, signal his disdain for public-health officials, and send up a flare to far-right shitposters and trolls.
On Friday, December 2, Elizabeth Whelan was at home on Chappaquiddick, off Massachusetts, when she received a text message from a State Department official—a representative from the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs—asking when she might be available for a visit. He had news concerning her youngest brother, Paul.
A delegation of at least three U.S. lawmakers has visited Havana and met with Cuba’s government this week.
The Vermont independent said he believes part of why the Arizona senator left the Democratic Party is because her constituents lost faith in her.