Tag: good reason
The Supreme Court’s Colorado Opinion Is About Fear, Not Law
This is The Trump Trials by George T. Conway III, a newsletter that chronicles the former president’s legal troubles. Sign up here.
You can’t always get what you want. What Mick Jagger said about life applies with equal, perhaps even greater, force to litigation. Like life, litigation has its ups and downs. It reflects human fears and frailties—because judges, lawyers, and litigants are human. Law is never perfect, and never will be.
And so it is with the United States
The Plagiarism War Has Begun
Updated at 4:10 p.m. ET on January 4, 2024.
When the conservative authors Christopher Rufo and Christopher Brunet accused Harvard’s Claudine Gay last month of having committed plagiarism in her dissertation, they were clearly motivated by a culture-war opportunity. Gay, the school’s first Black president—and, for some critics, an avatar of the identity-politics bureaucracy on college campuses—had just flubbed testimony before Congress about anti-Semitism on campus. She was already under pressure to resign. Evidence of scholarly misconduct was just
Two Diverging Approaches to Social Justice
“The problem with this dilemma you pose is that it takes a great deal of ‘wisdom’ to know when to apply either approach,” one reader argues.
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.
Last week, I asked what you
Why Biden’s Age Is An Unavoidable Conversation
“Human history is littered with good leaders who stayed too long,” one reader argues.
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.
Last week I asked readers to opine on whether Democrats should stick with
You Should Worry About the Data Retailers Collect About You
A man walks into a Minneapolis-area Target, angry about coupons his teenage daughter received for baby clothes and cribs. “Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?” he asks a store manager. Except, his daughter really was pregnant. Target had tuned a marketing-prediction model so tightly that it could successfully tell what was happening inside her body, before even the girl’s family knew.
This story, relayed by Charles Duhigg in The New York Times in 2012, is one of
Israel’s Avalanche – The Atlantic
Israel’s democracy is still intact, but the country has already lost something essential.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Utter Collapse
As Israel nears the end of a week of turmoil, its democracy remains intact. On Monday, the country’s Benjamin Netanyahu–led ruling coalition—the most hard-right government in Israel’s history—passed one component of its planned judicial overhaul. The proposed legislation has inspired months of outcry from Israelis, many of whom believe, with good reason, that these changes
The Literary Legacy of C. Michael Curtis
A few years ago, the novelist and short-story writer Lauren Groff reflected on what had launched one of the more sparkling literary careers of recent years:
When C. Michael Curtis pulled my short story “L. DeBard and Aliette” from the slush pile in 2005, I was in my first semester in graduate school at Madison. In the years since I’d graduated from college, I’d been a bartender and administrative assistant and had worked my brain and fingers raw, trying and
The Doctor Who Helped Take Down FTX in His Spare Time
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. On November 2, a report from the
The Wrong Way to Do Politics at the Office
In a 2005 episode of The Office, Michael Scott, the office manager, requires his employees to choose an upside-down index card from a tray and place it on their forehead. The cards bear a racial or ethnic label—Black, Jewish, Italian, and so on—and Michael tells the employees to treat one another according to the label listed on the card and to “stir the melting pot” by playing to racial stereotypes. The scene, which ends with Michael getting
Is This the Tastiest Thanksgiving Ever?
Congrats! You are probably about to eat the very best Thanksgiving meal of your life.
Maybe your turkey is drier than a World Cup fan in Qatar, or maybe you overcommitted and nothing is ready by 8 p.m. Maybe you’re making the same exact menu as last year. But if you round up every single Thanksgiving dinner in the United States—all the birds and pies and mac and cheeses and green-bean casseroles—on average the meal will be just marginally, imperceptibly