Adult friendships can be tricky to maintain. People move away from their college town as schooling ends, careers begin and monopolize our time, socializing at happy hours can start to lose its appeal as you get older. And during the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of Americans moved from cities full of their friends to less populated areas.
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.
Finding signs to worry about the future of American democracy is not hard, but few are quite so painful and acute as the cognitive dissonance displayed by Rusty Bowers this week.Bowers, the Republican speaker of the Arizona State House, was the star witness during yesterday’s hearing of the U.S. House’s January 6 committee. Bowers calls himself a conservative Republican, and he has the record to back that claim up.
In 1998, outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana, a hydraulic excavator at Buesching’s Peat Moss & Mulch stripped back a layer of peat and struck bone in the underlying marl. Bone is the right word: This bone belonged to a mastodon, and mastodons are still fresh bodies in the dirt, not petrified fossils entombed in the rock. Although they might be popularly imagined living way back with the dinosaurs, the Ice Age megafauna went extinct only moments ago, in staggered waves over human history.
In some of the most dramatic testimony from the fourth hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Shaye Moss, a Black election worker in Georgia, and her mother Ruby Freeman described how their lives were forever changed in December of 2020 when Trump’s top campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed they manipulated ballots to rig the election outcome in the state, which was among those he had lost.
Tuesday’s hearing of the House committee investigating the January 6 attack included evidence of how then-President Trump and his campaign “were directly involved” in a plot to replace Biden electors with fake electors for Trump in states where he had lost.
The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection held its fourth public hearing Tuesday with testimony that included a series of Republican state officials detailing pressure they faced from President Donald Trump and his staff to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Hospitals look to Washington to provide more security for what they consider critical national infrastructure.
Shots will be be available for children from 6 months to 5 years as early as next week.
The Iowa Supreme Court cleared the way for lawmakers to severely limit or even ban abortion in the state.
Now the CDC’s vaccine expert panel will review for recommendation to the CDC director.
Some 25,000 are now in the national emergency strategic stockpile.
Fears have mounted that the central bank might trigger a recession sometime in the next year with its aggressive rate action.
Things are so dire that central bank policymakers might hike rates by three-quarters of a percentage point, a move not taken in almost 30 years.
America’s rampant inflation is imposing severe pressures on families, forcing them to pay much more for food, gas and rent.
In the final part of our Juneteenth special broadcast, we look at Harvard University’s recent report detailing the school’s extensive ties to slavery and pledged $100 million for a fund for scholars to continue to research the topic. The report documents dozens of prominent people associated with Harvard who enslaved people, including four Harvard presidents.
Lawmakers have been working to bridge a political impasse after the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, last month.
For its fourth hearing, the January 6 committee provided the nation with a battery of new details about a plot that investigators say former President Donald Trump, his attorneys, advisers, members of his administration, and some members of Congress deployed so that the 45th president could stay in power despite losing the 2020 election to now-President Joe Biden.
In the news today: The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 coup attempt today heard evidence of Republican attempts to place fake electoral counts for several states in the hands of Vice President Mike Pence, thus allowing Pence to claim the counts for those states were “in dispute.
Donald Trump’s final day as a political force will come eventually—with the heat death of the universe, if nothing else. Right now, Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis is racing against the House Jan.
In the Academy Award-winning 1984 film Amadeus, F. Murray Abraham brilliantly portrayed Antonio Salieri as a mediocre court composer who was so threatened by the meteoric rise and prodigious talents of Wolfgang Mozart that he spent the better part of his life mired in spite, trying to bring Mozart down.
Britt triumphed over Rep. Mo Brooks in a race where former President Donald Trump flipped his initial endorsement to belatedly support her.
New Jersey’s Cory Booker joined California farmworkers last week to harvest lettuce, plant tomatoes, and prepare leafy greens for selling, becoming the second U.S. senator to take part in the “Take Our Jobs” campaign.
To date, only Booker and California Senator Alex Padilla have accepted the challenge from United Farm Workers’ (UFW), UFW Foundation (UFWF), and farmworkers to work side-by-side with them for one day.
The new laws that Democratic Gov. Jon Bel Edwards signed anticipate the fall of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade.
The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act includes modest curbs on obtaining firearms, and aid for mental health and schools.
Ravnsborg was immediately removed from office and is barred from serving in public office ever again.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.As more truths about Donald Trump and his attempted coup come out, I fear there will be more irrational anger and threats from people who cannot bear the truth.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
Beware the luxury beach resort.
Russia has a plan for Ukraine.
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 wrote, “Pick your poison: high inflation or a recession. Which would you prefer and why?”Dan makes a strong case for recession over inflation. “The reasons are many,” he writes:
1.
The American mall has supposedly been dying for years. The Guardian announced its death in 2014, in an article featuring Seph Lawless’s photography of abandoned malls, their once-lively atriums gone to seed. In 2015, The New York Times published its own photography of eerily empty buildings in Ohio and Maryland.
In the summer of 2003, just weeks after an outbreak of monkeypox sickened about 70 people across the Midwest, Mark Slifka visited “the super-spreader,” he told me, “who infected half of Wisconsin’s cases.”Chewy, a prairie dog, had by that point succumbed to the disease, which he’d almost certainly caught in an exotic-animal facility that he’d shared with infected pouched rats from Ghana.