Tag: rare occasions
Why Don’t Biden’s Political Wins Register With Voters?
Objectively speaking, President Joe Biden has presided over some significant, even historic, accomplishments: a massive vaccine rollout, the biggest infrastructure investment since the Eisenhower administration, the lowest unemployment rate in over 50 years. Yet, when voters are asked about these things, their responses are perplexing. Poll after poll show that voters have never heard of these programs, are annoyed the media isn’t reporting about them more, or they just don’t care. Why don’t Biden’s political and legislative victories penetrate the
A Case for Redirecting DEI Funds
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.
Question of the Week
If there were a Hall of Fame for song lyrics and you got to make one nomination, what would it be and why? (The linguist John McWhorter might pick something from Steely Dan.)
Send your responses to [email protected].
Conversations of Note
Here
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
The Schools That Ban Smartphones
Last October, I accepted an invitation to speak (for—full disclosure—an honorarium) at St. Andrew’s, a small Episcopal boarding school in Middletown, Delaware. It was beautiful in the expected ways: the lake on which the school’s champion crew teams practice, the mid-autumn foliage, the redbrick buildings. But it was also beautiful in one unexpected way, which revealed itself slowly.
My first experience of St. Andrew’s was dinner, served family style, with all 317 students at tables presided over by faculty members.
13 Reader Views on Dysfunction
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.
Last week, I asked readers to opine on the dysfunction that they see in the world, or to spotlight something that works well, even though, as John Gall writes in The Systems Bible, we owe sympathy to “anyone who