Tag: mainstream media
What Will Happen to Uvalde Now?
Isla Vista, Charleston, San Bernardino, Orlando, Sutherland Springs, Parkland, Thousand Oaks, Virginia Beach, Buffalo: Over the decade since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, scores of American communities have become inextricably linked to mass death. With the killing of 19 children and two of their teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, last week, the town of 16,000 near the southern border became yet another of our nation’s landmarks of loss.
History suggests that the attention of
The Simple Anti-COVID Measures We’re Not Taking
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. Soon after, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
Say you received $1 billion to spend on improving the world. How would you spend it? Why?
Email your thoughts to [email protected]. I’ll publish a selection of correspondence in an upcoming newsletter.
Conversations of
How I Found Sympathy for COVID Skeptics
The call is one we’ve been expecting, so when it comes we’re jolted but not surprised. It’s from my wife’s sister, who lives in Arizona. She and her husband are both proudly unvaccinated—predictably enough, since their chief sources of information are Fox News and social media. They’ve believed from the beginning that the coronavirus has been overblown by mainstream media, and that doctors are in on it because they somehow get paid more when they record the death of
Your Starkly Different Perspectives on Omicron
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As the Omicron stage of the pandemic wears on, many of you are anxious, frustrated, and incredulous or even despairing as to how others are behaving––but you’re not of like mind. Some of you believe that the response to the new variant is overwrought, while others think that it is underwhelming.
“How should America’s colleges, high schools, and elementary schools handle the winter surge of COVID-19 cases associated with the Omicron variant?” I asked
The Vaccine Culture War Doesn’t Have to Be So Dire
Large swaths of America’s vaccinated masses—along with elites in the White House, boardrooms, public schools, hospitals, and the mainstream media—are feeling frustrated with their unvaccinated neighbors. And understandably so. COVID-19 vaccines offer stellar protection against hospitalization and death. I despair that many thousands more unvaccinated Americans will die needlessly, that overcrowded hospitals will keep struggling to treat people with other medical emergencies, and that continuing spread of the coronavirus puts vulnerable people such as my grandparents at greater risk of
David Brooks Reconsiders ‘Bobos in Paradise’
This article was published online on August 2, 2021.
The dispossessed set out early in the mornings. They were the outsiders, the scorned, the voiceless. But weekend after weekend—unbowed and undeterred—they rallied together. They didn’t have much going for them in their great battle against the privileged elite, but they did have one thing—their yachts.
During the summer and fall of 2020, a series of boat parades—Trumptillas—cruised American waters in support of Donald Trump. The participants gathered rowdily in