Conor Friedersdorf

Robert Garcia, a 45-year-old former Long Beach, California, mayor and newly elected Democratic U.S. representative, is hardly the first openly gay member of Congress, but there’s something unique and irreverent in how he has approached his…
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On Friday, Memphis police released body- and street-cam video of five officers beating Tyre Nichols, an unarmed civilian who later died of his injuries. Unlike many recent notorious examples of police brutality, in this instance the victim…
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In the classic Japanese film Rashomon, four people retell the same incident in different and sometimes contradictory ways. The debate about the Twitter Files—documents from and Slack conversations within the social-media platform now owned…
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Governor Ron DeSantis has a growing store of admirers. This includes many who have watched the cantankerous Floridian only from afar. They have heard glowing things. He was the biggest winner of an otherwise dark election cycle for…
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The lurid spectacle that is Johnny Depp’s $50 million defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife Amber Heard hasn’t just tarnished his star and hers with allegations that he beat her and violated her with a bottle or that she severed part of…
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The majority of Americans who insist that “cancel culture” is a problem and the minority who counter that it is a fraud, a myth, or a moral panic are too often talking past one another.One faction invokes the term cancel culture as…
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It’s unusual for a one-off political speech to make someone famous. This is especially the case in today’s toxic fog of disinformation and apathy. But last week a Democratic state senator named Mallory McMorrow from Royal Oak, Michigan,…
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Humans of all political persuasions have a tendency to lose sight of why taboos exist and to enforce them rigidly rather than thoughtfully. In two recent cases, American educators chose quality instructional material for their students,…
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Nicole Bolden was driving in Florissant, Missouri, in 2014 with her two small children when a car in front of her made an illegal U-turn, causing a collision. Police arrived on the scene, and, after ensuring everyone’s safety, checked…
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Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, one of the nine surviving children of the late Robert F. Kennedy, was at the family compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, with a gaggle of his relatives and siblings last August when the California Board of Parole…
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