Tag: public officials
Are Social-Media Companies Ready for Another January 6?
In January, Donald Trump laid out in stark terms what consequences await America if charges against him for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election wind up interfering with his presidential victory in 2024. “It’ll be bedlam in the country,” he told reporters after an appeals-court hearing. Just before a reporter began asking if he would rule out violence from his supporters, Trump walked away.
This would be a shocking display from a presidential candidate—except the presidential candidate was Donald Trump.
How Liberals Lost the White Working Class
On April 29, 1954, a cross section of Cincinnati’s municipal bureaucracy—joined by dozens of representatives drawn from local employers, private charities, the religious community, and other corners of the city establishment—gathered at the behest of the mayor’s office to discuss a new problem confronting the city. Or, rather, about 50,000 new problems, give or take. That was roughly the number of Cincinnati residents who had recently migrated to the city from the poorest parts of southern Appalachia. The
The Fight Against Robotaxis in San Francisco
A few weeks ago, Dan Afergan, a software engineer, met a few friends at 540 Rogues, a bar in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond neighborhood. As Afergan and his companions nursed their drinks, someone walked in with some unusual news: “There’s a Cruise out there with a cone stuck on it.”
Afergan stepped outside to check it out. Sure enough, a self-driving cab from the company Cruise, which is majority-owned by General Motors, stood frozen in the middle of the
Saving Local News Could Also Save Taxpayers Money
Zak Podmore did not bring down a corrupt mayor. He did not discover secret torture sites or expose abuses by a powerful religious institution. But there was something about this one article he wrote as a reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune in 2019 that changed my conception of the value of local news.
Podmore, then a staff journalist for the Tribune and a corps member of Report for America, a nonprofit I co-founded, published a story revealing that
Elon Musk Is Right About Free Speech on Twitter
Elon Musk, in his effort to buy Twitter, signaled that under his ownership, the company would allow all speech that the First Amendment protects. “By ‘free speech,’ I simply mean that which matches the law,” he tweeted on April 26. “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”
Many commentators were quick to point out that, as a private company, Twitter is not required to follow the First Amendment, which applies only to federal and state governments.
Canadian Truckers Polarize American Commentators
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely, intriguing conversations and solicits reader responses to one question of the moment. Every Friday, he publishes some of your most thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
With another Valentine’s Day just behind us, I’m reminded of the profound changes in social conceptions of love, marriage, sex, and romance across centuries, and the smaller changes that I’ve witnessed personally during
‘There’s So Much That’s Not in the Constitution’
During oral argument at the Supreme Court in December over Mississippi’s abortion ban, Justice Sonia Sotomayor laid bare a fundamental truth: “There’s so much that’s not in the Constitution.”
Her point is a deep one, and salient to the abortion debate: The text of the Constitution does not explicitly affirm the right to abortion; no one disagrees with that. But the Constitution protects far more than what it literally describes. Unwritten ideas necessarily guide even the strictest readings of the
Facebook’s Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls
Social media gets blamed for many of America’s ills, including the polarization of our politics and the erosion of truth itself. But proving that harms have occurred to all of society is hard. Far easier to show is the damage to a specific class of people: adolescent girls, whose rates of depression, anxiety, and self-injury surged in the early 2010s, as social-media platforms proliferated and expanded. Much more than for boys, adolescence typically heightens girls’ self-consciousness about their changing
What Is America’s COVID Goal Now?
We know how this ends: The coronavirus becomes endemic, and we live with it forever. But what we don’t know—and what the U.S. seems to have no coherent plan for—is how we are supposed to get there. We’ve avoided the hard questions whose answers will determine what life looks like in the next weeks, months, and years: How do we manage the transition to endemicity? When are restrictions lifted? And what long-term measures do we keep, if any, when we
Bob Corker on the Future of the Republican Party
Senator Bob Corker had just gotten out of a hot-yoga session with his wife on a Sunday morning in 2017 when his phone started blowing up. President Donald Trump was tweeting about him, falsely claiming that the Tennessee Republican supported the Iran deal (he did not) and that he had begged Trump for a reelection endorsement (Corker says he never did such a thing). “I got to my house, and I was dripping wet, standing in my closet, getting undressed