Tag: great deal
AI Is Pushing Science Into an Age of Uncertainty
This summer, a pill intended to treat a chronic, incurable lung disease entered mid-phase human trials. Previous studies have demonstrated that the drug is safe to swallow, although whether it will improve symptoms of the painful fibrosis that it targets remains unknown; this is what the current trial will determine, perhaps by next year. Such a tentative advance would hardly be newsworthy, except for a wrinkle in the medicine’s genesis: It is likely the first drug fully designed
Should Democrats Stick With Biden?
Plus: controversy over a talk about racial color-blindness
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
Should Democrats stick with Joe Biden or replace him with a younger presidential nominee in 2024?
Send your responses to
TikTok made knockoffs cool. At what cost?
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Everyone loves to feel like they’re getting a good deal. It’s a trait found across history and geography: People haggled in the agoras and souks of antiquity; they bargain in car dealerships; they scour the internet for coupon codes. Now deal hunting has been discovered by TikTok, where
Saving Israeli Democracy – The Atlantic
This past summer, I marked a personal milestone: 40 years since moving to Israel.
The summer of 1982 was one of the lowest points in Israeli history. All of the ambivalence over Israel that would divide the Jewish people in the coming decades began to coalesce then, when Israel was fighting a war in Lebanon that large parts of the Israeli public regarded as unnecessary and deceitful.
I had joined an Israel that was, for the first time,
Lauren Groff: Why Read Literary Biography?
What strange beasts literary biographies are, how mixed their reasons for existing. The desire to read one must come from admiration for the writer’s work, but a literary biographer’s central concern isn’t a writer’s work; it’s the writer’s life. And, though the gods of capitalism may grumble at my saying this, an artist’s work and life are radically separate things. The art comes alive only when it meets another mind, like desert seeds that wait patiently until a freak rainfall
How the Anti-war Camp Went Intellectually Bankrupt
In 1942, answering a pacifist opponent of British involvement in the Second World War, George Orwell replied that “pacifism is objectively pro-fascist.” There have of course been many times in human history when opposition to war has been morally justified, intellectually coherent, and, in the end, vindicated. But the war to defeat fascism during the middle part of the past century was simply not one of them. “This is elementary common sense,” Orwell wrote at the time. “If you hamper
Why the Left Is Learning to Love the Military
In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Harlem’s Riverside Church to a crowd of thousands that flowed out the door as far as 120th Street. King publicly condemned the Vietnam War because it had “broken and eviscerated” the civil-rights and anti-poverty movements at home. The American government was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
Read: Martin Luther King Jr. on the Vietnam War
In 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky invoked another MLK speech while
How Abortion Will Affect the California Midterms
CERRITOS, Calif.—Abortion rights dominated the message when the Democratic congressional candidate Jay Chen sent off a small group who had gathered to canvass for him here early on Sunday morning.
“A right that we had all assumed we would have, the right of a woman to have control of her own health-care decisions, was taken away after 50 years,” Chen told the volunteers. He reminded them that his opponent, Republican Representative Michelle Steel, had co-sponsored “a federal ban on abortion”
The Most Pathetic Men in America
When he wasn’t melting down over how “very badly” he was treated or acting like a seditious lunatic, Donald Trump could be downright serene in certain Washington settings—and never more so than when he would swan in for dinner at the Trump International Hotel, a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House and the only other place where he would ever agree to eat.
Unlike the Obamas, who would sneak out for date nights at trendy restaurants,
Why a Variant’s Deadliness Is So Hard to Define
The coronavirus is on a serious self-improvement kick. Since infiltrating the human population, SARS-CoV-2 has splintered into hundreds of lineages, with some seeding new, fast-spreading variants. A more infectious version first overtook the OG coronavirus last spring, before giving way to the ultra-transmissible Alpha (B.1.1.7) variant. Now Delta (B.1.617.2), potentially the most contagious contender to date, is poised to usurp the global throne.
Alphabetically, chronologically, the virus is getting better and better at its primary objective: infecting us. And