Tag: News outlets
How to Tackle Truth Decay
When then-President Donald Trump was briefed on the California wildfires in 2020, the scientific opinion he heard was that climate change was real and had contributed to the conflagrations that ended up consuming more than 4 million acres and killing 31 people. His response? “Science doesn’t know.”
Millions of Americans trusted Trump, a fact he leveraged to attack the trustworthiness of science itself. Trump’s actions are part of a larger pattern of assault on expertise. People need to trust that
15 Readers on Trust in American Institutions
“My trust is more fragile than 10 years ago,” one reader writes, “because I can see very easily how our institutions could be completely destroyed in a matter of months.”
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,
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
Israel’s Tattered Social Contract – The Atlantic
Eran Schwartz looks like a fighter pilot. The 40-something appeared last week on the Israeli television show Ofira and Berkowitz—a black V-neck T-shirt over his trim, athletic chest; his black hair cut short—to defend his decision to end his service in the air-force reserves. “We’re not the ones who tore up the social contract,” he said. “We swore to serve a state that is Jewish and democratic. And if Netanyahu is going to end Israel’s being a liberal
The DEI Industry Needs to Check Its Privilege
The diversity, equity, and inclusion industry exploded in 2020 and 2021, but it is undergoing a reckoning of late, and not just in states controlled by Republicans, where officials are dismantling DEI bureaucracies in public institutions. Corporations are cutting back on DEI spending and personnel. News outlets such as The New York Times and New York magazine are publishing more articles that cover the industry with skepticism. And DEI practitioners themselves are raising concerns about how their competitors operate.
The
Welcome to Elon Musk’s Casino
Recently, comedy clubs have begun doing this thing that seemed, when I first encountered it, both wildly hypocritical and more than a little sad.
I first noticed this new phenomenon at the Comedy Cellar, in Manhattan’s West Village. The Cellar, which was more or less my second home during my early 30s, is a warm and intimate-to-the-point-of-claustrophobia club that I have loved unconditionally. So it was particularly distressing the first time I saw a bouncer distributing padded envelopes and
What Did All Those COVID Infections Get Us?
I, as far as I can tell, have not yet been infected by the virus that causes COVID-19. Which, by official counts, makes me an oddball among Americans.
Granted, I could be wrong. I’ve never had a known exposure or symptoms, but contact tracing in the United States is crummy and plenty of infections are silent. I’ve taken many coronavirus tests, but not that many coronavirus tests, and it’s always possible that some of their results missed the mark.
If
Joe Rogan’s Show May Be Dumb. But Is It Actually Deadly?
Look, I think it’s fine that Joe Rogan said, with COVID-case rates coming down in April, he wouldn’t tell a healthy 21-year-old to get vaccinated. That’s a value judgment, not a lie. And we may as well ignore the fact that he treated himself with ivermectin in September, after he got sick himself. He was also taking monoclonal antibodies and steroids (and some studies did appear to show, at first, that ivermectin was effective). But a lot of bullshit spewed
Solving the Wordle Puzzle – The Atlantic
Wordle! It’s a word game people are playing online. Each day, the game offers one new puzzle: Guess a five-letter English word correctly in six or fewer tries. After each guess, the game tells you which letters are correct, which are wrong, and which are the right letters in the wrong place. It’s fun! But why?
Games seem like trifles, and many are, which can make them difficult to take seriously as art or culture. Perhaps that’s why accounts of