Tag: others
Lessons From Russia’s Occupation of a Ukrainian Village
When the Russian army first began shelling Lukashivka, a village in northern Ukraine, dozens of residents fled to the Horbonos family’s cellar. Children, pregnant women, bed-ridden pensioners, and the Horbonoses themselves headed down below the family’s peach orchard and vegetable patches, and waited. For 10 days, they listened as shells whistled and crashed above several times an hour. The attacks left huge craters in the land, incinerating the Horbonoses’ car, and destroying the roof of their house. Finally, on
Shadowbanning Is Big Tech’s Big Problem
Sometimes, it feels like everyone on the internet thinks they’ve been shadowbanned. Republican politicians have been accusing Twitter of shadowbanning—that is, quietly suppressing their activity on the site—since at least 2018, when for a brief period, the service stopped autofilling the usernames of Representatives Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, and Matt Gaetz, as well as other prominent Republicans, in its search bar. Black Lives Matter activists have been accusing TikTok of shadowbanning since 2020, when, at the height of the George
Keith Ridgway: ‘The Boy,’ a Short Story
The trees are living things. The grass, the clumps of ragwort, the hard full ground. All of it alive. In the sky an airplane is on its side, turning east with its belly up, its engines whining, a rumble in its wake that is felt in the gut, an additional tremble in the limbs. They are all frightened.
There are eight men. And the boy. Nine of them. There are six soldiers. The soldiers are outnumbered, and the
Anne Applebaum: Social Media Made Spreading Disinformation Easy
Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, an expert on Eastern Europe, has long watched social media’s power with great concern. Yesterday, at Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy, a conference hosted by The Atlantic and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, she spoke with David Axelrod, the founding director of the Institute of Politics, about the dangers these platforms pose to democracy. They discussed Russia’s disinformation efforts, what makes some conspiracy theories so successful, how institutions can rebuild trust, and
20 Reader Views on Transgender People in Competitive Sports
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. Every Friday, he publishes some thoughtful replies.
Sign up for the newsletter here.
After Lia Thomas became the first transgender athlete to win an NCAA swimming title, intensifying the ongoing debate about transgender athletes at all levels of sports, I asked readers, “What do you think about this, and why? What are
The Risk of Ignoring Long COVID
The world was slow to recognize long COVID as one of the most serious consequences of the coronavirus. Six months into the pathogen’s tear across the globe, SARS-CoV-2 was still considered an acute airway infection that would spark a weeks-long illness at most; anyone who experienced symptoms for longer could be expected to be dismissed by droves of doctors. Now long COVID is written into CDC and WHO documents; it makes a cameo in the newest version of President Joe
The Ultra-Introverts Who Live Nocturnally
Imagine it’s nighttime. You slip under the covers and turn out the light. Maybe you hear cars honking in the street, or voices from the other side of your apartment wall, or your partner snoring beside you; maybe it’s quiet. It might even feel like the whole world is drifting off with you.
But out in that dark night, while most people are fast asleep, there’s a whole world of people who are wide awake. They go to work,
The Pandemic Isn’t Over for Immunocompromised People
When the coronavirus pandemic began, Emily Landon thought about her own risk only in rare quiet moments. An infectious-disease doctor at the University of Chicago Medicine, she was cramming months of work into days, preparing her institution for the virus’s arrival in the United States. But Landon had also recently developed rheumatoid arthritis—a disease in which a person’s immune system attacks their own joints—and was taking two drugs that, by suppressing said immune system, made her more vulnerable to pathogens.
The Seven Habits of COVID-Resilient Nations
The tweet has stuck with me for months now: a chart of cumulative COVID-19 deaths per capita in the United States, the United Kingdom, and South Korea. The U.S. and U.K. lines rise up like mountains relative to the valley of South Korea below. Even as Omicron-related deaths have increased in South Korea more recently, the picture hasn’t changed much.
South Korea “kept deaths 40 times lower all the way till 75% of population fully vaccinated,” the physician Vincent
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