Tag: next time
Will an Influential Conservative Brain Trust Stand Up to Trump?
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. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
What’s been your personal experience with the health-care system in the United States (or the country where you live) and what larger lessons, if any, have you drawn from it all?
Send your responses to [email protected]
Is America Simply Sicker Now?
The most haunting memory of the pandemic for Laura, a doctor who practices internal medicine in New York, is a patient who never got COVID at all. A middle-aged man diagnosed with Stage 3 colon cancer in 2019, he underwent surgery and a round of successful chemotherapy and was due for regular checkups to make sure the tumor wasn’t growing. Then the pandemic hit, and he decided that going to the hospital wasn’t worth the risk of getting COVID. So
Don’t Wait to Get Your Kid Vaccinated
Karen Ocwieja delivered her twin sons last June, just weeks before Delta broke across the American Northeast. For months, she and her husband sheltered the boys, who’d been born premature, limiting their exposures to friends, family, and other kids, hoping to guard them from COVID’s worst. But all four of them still ended up catching the virus this January—the boys’ first bona fide illness. Then, in May, the twins tested positive again. Born with Ocwieja’s antibodies from pregnancy and
How Electrifying Everything Could Save the Planet
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Humanity’s existential crisis is straightforward. The world is getting richer, richer people use more energy, and the planet’s most popular sources of energy—such as coal, oil, and wood—are slowly cooking the biosphere.
Saul Griffith, an entrepreneur and MacArthur Grant recipient, has a solution that is similarly straightforward. We have to electrify everything that we do. And we have to power the electrification of modern life with zero-carbon sources such as solar, wind, and nuclear.
‘The Ring’ Is a Modern Horror Classic
The 2002 horror film The Ring can be summarized in a delightfully analog fashion: After finding a VHS tape and receiving a phone call, a local newspaper reporter searches library archives to solve a mystery. As John Mulaney would say, that is a very old-fashioned sentence.
But while audiences today have little to fear from a ghost that travels by VHS and kills by landline, the terrors in Gore Verbinski’s modern classic are oddly resonant. The threat at the center