Tag: American public
When Experts Fail – The Atlantic
Experts hate to be wrong. When I first started writing about the public’s hostility toward expertise and established knowledge more than a decade ago, I predicted that any number of crises—including a pandemic—might be the moment that snaps the public back to its senses. I was wrong. I didn’t foresee how some citizens and their leaders would respond to the cycle of advances and setbacks in the scientific process and to the inevitable limitations of human experts.
The coronavirus
Beached Syringes and the Invention of Medical Waste
The first tide of syringes washed ashore on Thursday, August 13, 1987. Hundreds of unmarked hypodermic needles spilled out of the surf that afternoon, accompanied by vials and prescription bottles, along a 50-mile stretch of New Jersey beaches during peak tourist season. By the next morning, New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, an environmentalist Republican with national ambitions, was aloft in a helicopter surveying the floating slick of medical waste and other garbage that now stretched from Manasquan to Atlantic
UFO Fever Is Taking Over Congress
Earlier today, three witnesses came before Congress to testify about their experiences with unidentified flying objects. A former Navy pilot spoke of the mysterious objects that he has seen with his own eyes and through radar, and how frequently pilots encounter them in the air. A retired Navy commander described the time he pulled his jet up to a Tic Tac–shaped object hovering over the ocean, then watched it suddenly speed up and vanish.
The most anticipated remarks, however, came
Long COVID is the emergency that won’t end
In the early spring of 2020, the condition we now call long COVID didn’t have a name, much less a large community of patient advocates. For the most part, clinicians dismissed its symptoms, and researchers focused on SARS-CoV-2 infections’ short-term effects. Now, as the pandemic approaches the end of its third winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the chronic toll of the coronavirus is much more familiar. Long COVID has been acknowledged by prominent experts, national leaders, and the World Health
How J. Edgar Hoover Took Down the KKK
In 1964, during a phone call with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover about setting up the new FBI office in Mississippi, President Lyndon B. Johnson broached the idea of really doing something about the Klan. He had been up late reading the bureau’s reports on the Communist Party, with their jaw-dropping inside details. What if the Bureau, seizing on the momentum provided by the Civil Rights Act, could do the same thing to the Klan? he wondered aloud to
Family Separation Can Happen Again
The moment was practically unrecognizable in modern politics. Just four years ago, Democrats and Republicans in Congress seemed to agree on something. And not on an innocuous topic like fixing roads and bridges, no—they came together on one of the most controversial subjects in the history of American political debate: immigration.
When the American public learned definitively in June 2018 that government officials were forcibly taking children away from their parents as part of a misguided scheme to discourage
Anand Giridharadas: Persuasion Isn’t Dead
In June 2014, Aleksandra Krylova and Anna Bogacheva arrived in the United States on a clandestine mission. Krylova was a high-ranking official at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia, an ostensibly private company that was connected with Russian intelligence. Bogacheva, her road buddy, a researcher and data cruncher, was more junior. Their trip had been well plotted: a transcontinental itinerary, SIM cards, burner phones, cameras, visas obtained under the pretense of personal travel, and, just in
Big Tech Founders Are America’s False Idols
My first job out of UCLA was in the analyst program at Morgan Stanley, in the 1980s. Like most of my analyst class, I had no idea what investment banking was—only that we were at the helm of the capitalist bobsled and could make a lot of money. We paid scant consideration to the wider role finance played in society. We were charged with birthing the apex predator of the capitalist species, the public company. Our economic mission, we
The Constitutional Case Against a Federal Abortion Ban
Welcome to Up for Debate. On Wednesdays, I round up timely conversations and ask readers a thought-provoking question. Later, I publish some of your thoughtful replies. (Were you forwarded this email? Sign up here.)
Question of the Week
What are your thoughts or views about immigration? Feel free to write about politics, policy, culture, or personal experience. Emails about the recent controversy in Martha’s Vineyard are fine, but you needn’t address that particular news story to participate this week.
A Court Without Precedent – The Atlantic
Just a few years ago, a clear majority of Americans trusted the Supreme Court. Now, a month after Roe v. Wade was overturned, poll after poll shows that a clear majority of Americans do not.
To which many of the Court’s closest observers would say, “What took so long?”
For more than a decade, the Court has issued narrow rulings, decided by slim majorities, that align with Republican political goals. Five Justices unleashed dark money in politics. They gutted the