Our favorite Washington Post op-eds of 2021

The Washington Post Opinions section published hundreds of op-eds from outside contributors this year, covering an enormous range of topics, from the coronavirus pandemic to the United States’ racial reckoning to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and beyond. Below, opinions staff members pick their favorite op-eds from 2021 and explain what made their choices stand out.

opinion articles examples 2021

The GOP is at a turning point. History is watching us.

By Liz Cheney

At a critical moment in May, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) cast her lot — in this op-ed — with lawmakers who wanted to investigate the causes and actors behind the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. The essay represented a point of no return for Cheney, who has since been ostracized by state and national Republicans. Months later, the House investigation continues, as does Cheney’s belief that, as she wrote, “we must be brave enough” to defend democracy “no matter what the short-term political consequences might be.”

— Michael Duffy, opinions editor at -large

It is painful to remember. We have to remember.

By Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

In his meditation in May upon the first anniversary of George Floyd’s killing, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. examined the United States’s instinct for forgetting whatever is painful and unjust. It was a powerful plea to remember, given the unaddressed racial inequities that Floyd’s death called attention to, but he was not optimistic that this time would be different: “I hope this anniversary motivates us to keep working hard to transform policing in this country, but George Floyd’s murder will not escape the demands of our rituals of innocence.”

— Michael Larabee, op-ed editor

My grandparents were stolen from their families as children. We must learn about this history.

By Deb Haaland

As secretary of the interior, Deb Haaland leads the department’s investigation into past treatment of Indigenous children at government-run boarding schools. This mission is personal to Haaland: Members of her family were taken away and “educated” at these schools, which attempted to erase their culture and identity. I was deeply moved by Haaland’s openness to share her family’s experience with us all as she shines a light on a dark period in our history.

— Nana Efua Mumford, manager of editorial, talent and logistics

Schools are banning my book. But queer kids need queer stories.

By Maia Kobabe

The high school years can be tough enough, as teens try to figure out themselves and the world around them. It’s senseless and cruel that schools would target for banning a book like Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer: A Memoir” — which the author hoped could serve, along with other works, as a “lifeline for queer youth who might not yet even know what terms to ask Google to find out more about their own identities, bodies and health.” This beautiful graphic op-ed recounts Kobabe’s own journey of self-discovery — and the role that libraries played in it.

— Chris Rukan, opinions design director

The Biden administration is moving too slowly on ‘ghost guns’ like the one that killed my daughter

By Bryan Muehlberger

The grieving father of a murdered 15-year-old goes online to order a DIY kit for the kind of gun that killed her, using her name, and it shows up on his doorstep. In Muehlberger’s op-ed, that devastating image leads to a passionate argument against cheap, untraceable “ghost guns” and a plea for the federal government to classify and regulate them as firearms.

— Nancy Szokan, assignment editor

What pretending to be a White guy taught me about privilege

By Annabelle Tometich

Annabelle Tometich is a half-Filipina, “half-Yugoslavian/English/Canadian” woman. But for 15 years, she lived as a French guy. Or, at least, she wrote as one. Jean Le Boeuf was the nom de plume she inherited when she became a restaurant critic for her hometown newspaper, and the name came with perks. “As Le Boeuf,” Tometich writes, “I could wield the ultimate power: Whiteness.” In her terrific op-ed, Tometich explores her upbringing in a community named for a Confederate colonel, her struggle for authority as a mixed-race person — and her decision to finally bid adieu to Monsieur LeBoeuf. Bon appétit.

— Drew Goins, assistant editor

opinion articles examples 2021

Environment

Wildfires are changing california forever and making it harder to see a future here.

By Kendra Atleework

Kendra Atleework’s essay transported me to rural California and “the high desert town of Bishop, at the eastern foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains” — a place I’ve never been. She conveyed the beauty of her home and her deep love for it but also her anxiety about changes in the land, especially the rising threat from wildfires. She made the burdens of climate change real in a deeply personal way.

— Mary-Ellen Deily, multiplatform editor

America’s rivers need help. I should know — I swam in 108 of them this summer.

By Tierra Curry

The protagonist of John Cheever’s short story “ The Swimmer ” set himself the challenge of getting home via a “river” of suburban backyard swimming pools. Neddy Merrill, meet Tierra Curry, who this summer set herself the challenge of winning a “fun, absurd” annual competition among her friends to “see who can swim in the most rivers between the summer solstice and fall equinox.” She tallied 108 rivers across eight states, encountering some natural beauty but more often bodies of water that need protection “not just from pollution but also from everyday insults.”

— Mark Lasswell, associate editor

How the amazing monarch butterfly migrants became refugees — from us

By Dan Fagin

The pandemic has reminded us that crises in our society and crises in the natural world are inextricable. In this op-ed, science journalist Dan Fagin gives a perfect example: Economic collapse in some tourist-dependent Mexican communities has led to deforestation, putting monarch butterflies in danger. The piece is heartbreaking but also surprisingly hopeful. Humans may have contributed to the butterfly’s plight, but they are also helping to stop it.

— Beatrix Lockwood, operations editor

opinion articles examples 2021

Cubans are losing their fear. We want change.

By Abraham Jiménez Enoa

When Cubans took to the streets this year during an unprecedented wave of protests — in defiance of regime repression — many around the world were surprised. But for Abraham Jiménez Enoa, our Global Opinions columnist in Havana, the demonstrations were the natural conclusion to years of frustration, especially among young Cubans. He had been documenting the disaffection for years at great personal risk: He was detained, strip-searched, threatened. But that day he saw people in the streets openly chanting what many had only whispered to him in private.

— Eli Lopez, senior editor for international opinions

I founded a boarding school for girls in Afghanistan. Don’t look away from us.

By Shabana Basij-Rasikh

The chaotic U.S.-led withdrawal from Afghanistan put an abrupt end to 20 years of Western support for women’s rights and democratic institutions in the country. This powerful piece by Basij-Rasikh (who has since become a Post Global Opinions contributor) explains how decisions made in Washington had dramatic individual consequences for the students of the all-girl school she created and led — giving us a rare perspective on events.

— Christian Caryl, global opinions editor

There are two Hong Kongs. China is betting one can survive without the other.

By Keith B. Richburg

“Two cities occupying the same compact space, but existing in parallel realities.” That is how Keith B. Richburg, a former Washington Post correspondent and now director of the University of Hong Kong Journalism and Media Studies Centre, describes Hong Kong today. Its civil society, artists and young people remain committed to the old vision of freedom that is quickly being stifled. But the Hong Kong of corporations and businesspeople is enthused by its booming economy and links to China. Richburg reframes the conversation about the city’s future, asking: Can this new Hong Kong survive devoid of what has long made it so special?

— Mili Mitra, global opinions editor

opinion articles examples 2021

From 9/11 to covid-19, I have seen how terror leads to fear, and fear to hatred

By Jaswinder Bolina

Jaswinder Bolina is a poet and essayist who writes on American culture and politics with uncommon nuance. For the 20th anniversary of 9/11, he gave us an op-ed with a twist — beginning with a personal story of being racially profiled in the aftermath of the attacks and building toward a broader meditation on the nature of terror and fear. Yet Bolina is also a critic who loves his country despite its flaws. So he ends with an optimistic vision. “Faced with terror,” he writes, “there is only one thing we have to fear, and we are better when we face it together.”

— Jen Balderama, associate editor

India’s covid-19 crisis is a dire warning for all countries

By Madhukar Pai and Manu Prakash

At the time that Madhukar Pai and Manu Prakash wrote to warn that the delta variant ravaging India would sweep the globe, the strain still felt a world away. Indeed, it would be two months before it caused yet another devastating wave here in the United States. If only Americans had heeded their warning. If only people realized now that low vaccination rates in developing countries mean another coronavirus catastrophe may still loom on the horizon.

— Robert Gebelhoff, assistant editor

I was supposed to have life-saving surgery. Tennessee’s covid-19 surge cost me a hospital bed.

By Betsy Phillips

Two years into the coronavirus pandemic, we need to be reminded of the human cost of misinformation and vaccine resistance. Betsy Phillips’s scary tale is part of the horrible toll on our nation and the world.

— Jamie Riley, local opinions editor

opinion articles examples 2021

This one goes out to every whiny brat restaurant customer

By Daphne Crawford

This op-ed — a Washington Post reader favorite — had it all: supposed adults behaving badly, the stresses of working a minimum-wage job in the restaurant industry during a pandemic, the forces that have led to an economic upheaval that is being called the “Great Resignation.” And it was served up with a saucy cup of ranch dressing on the side. High school senior Daphne Crawford has a brilliant future as a writer, if that is what she chooses to do (and I sure hope she does).

— Karen Tumulty, deputy editorial page editor

It’s hard to sell a piano these days. It’s even harder to contemplate junking one.

By John Ficarra

Former Mad magazine editor John Ficarra, an expert in falling pianos, writes on the fall of pianos, plinking out an elegy to his 39-year companion, an upright Baldwin, with which he recently parted ways. “You’d be surprised how many people cry when we do this,” said one of the workmen taking away his friend. Don’t be surprised if you shed a tear reading this piece.

— Ryan Vogt, multiplatform editor

We’re not posting for Gabby Petito. We’re posting for ourselves.

By Rachel Monroe

After the disappearance of 22-year-old Gabby Petito, many Americans rolled up their sleeves and opened their favorite social media app to investigate. Rachel Monroe, author of a book about our cultural fascination with crime, wrote a timely piece about how that type of social media sleuthing is often selfish. She writes: Reducing a victim to a trending topic takes away their humanity, flattening them into a meme.

— Ethan May, operations editor

Don’t see your favorite op-ed here? Let us know your pick in the comments. And read our 2020 picks here .

About this story

Art and design by Danielle Kunitz . Development by Yan Wu . Project coordination by Ethan May . Design editing by Chris Rukan .

Best Op-Eds of 2021: Teen Vogue’s Favorite Opinion Pieces 

By Teen Vogue Staff

woman talking with megaphone

It’s been quite a year. We’ve lived through many more months of a pandemic, an armed assault on the U.S. Capitol building , the first year of a new administration, a surge in anti-Asian hate crimes , historic floods and wildfires, and the dawning of the Olivia Rodrigo era . And the Teen Vogue community had thoughts on all of it.

To close 2021, we pulled together some of our favorite op-eds from the contributors, columnists, and activists who make Teen Vogue what it is. These are the stories that resonated most with readers and got people talking. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

1. Biden Has the Power to Cancel Your Student Debt Right Now

Braxton Brewington of the Debt Collective made the case that President Joe Biden could wipe out literally all student debt right now with the stroke of a pen. The organization even drafted an executive order to make it easier for the president. As Brewington pointed out, any day would be a good one to “grant tens of millions of Americans a semblance of financial freedom.”

2. Campus Cancel-Culture Freakouts Obscure the Power of University Boards

Despite all the hand-wringing about overly sensitive students on college campuses, University of Massachusetts-Amherst professor Asheesh Kapur Saddique argued that the modern American university is actually a conservative institution. Many schools are controlled by boards composed of corporate executives and ruled by cold hard cash. “The right’s dominance of academia and its reign over universities is destroying higher education," the professor wrote , "and the only way to save the American university is for students and professors to take back control of campuses.”  

3. My Family Is Currently Living Through a Genocide

There’s a genocide underway in Ethiopia right now, but few people are talking about it — or even know it’s happening, according to youth activist Ariam Kidane. That’s because the Ethiopian government shut off all telecommunications in the war-torn Tigray region, leaving members of the diaspora, like Kidane, and the rest of the world in the dark. “Today marks nearly 300 days of almost no contact with our families,” she said . “We are witnessing ethnic cleansing, mass rape, forced famine, and more, and yet the world's leaders refuse to label what is happening in Tigray a ‘genocide.’”

4. Democratic Leaders in Congress Are Old and Out of Touch

Kaylen Ralph took the Democratic Party’s aging leadership to task in this op-ed, arguing that the same old moderate, by-the-rules playbook just won’t cut it in 2021. “Amid a pandemic, climate crisis, and recession, the Democratic Party is being led by politicians who have been in Congress for decades, presiding over a status quo that got us to this terrible point,” Ralph wrote . “We’d love to move on, if they’d only get out of the way."

5. Toxic Work Environments Shouldn’t Be a Rite of Passage

The “pay your dues” trap was thoroughly debunked in this brilliant reported op-ed by Rainesford Stauffer. Young people shouldn’t be expected to climb their way up a broken career ladder by enduring low wages, abusive bosses, long hours, and tremendous stress. We’ve learned the hard way that you can’t eat prestige, and that overwork is literally making us sick. “The myth that young people are supposed to endure abusive work environments as a rite of passage into the labor market skims over the systemic issues that allow those environments to persist in the first place,” Stauffer said .

6. The Homeschooling Community Needs Way More Oversight

The best writing often comes from people who are covering their own communities. That was the case with this reported op-ed from former homeschoolers Eve Ettinger and Nylah Burton, who wrote about the urgent need to better regulate the homeschooling community to prevent children from being abused. The current homeschooling landscape is under the thumb of the white evangelical community, which has fostered a fear of government regulation and, in many cases, provided students with substandard, religious educations. “While homeschooling can be a fantastic tool in the hands of parents and guardians who employ child-centric education methods," the authors wrote , "it’s a system that enables horrendous abuse if it's not practiced in good faith.” 

7. Talking About Anti-Asian Violence as Something New Is a Trap

Media narratives about the surge in attacks on Asian Americans during the COVID pandemic missed one important thing: Anti-Asian racism didn’t suddenly materialize out of nowhere. It’s baked into xenophobic attitudes toward immigrants in the United States, discriminatory policies such as the Chinese Exclusion Act, and wars that brought refugees from Cambodia and Vietnam to America’s shores. It’s been with us this whole time. As Nicholas Hatcher explained , “Violence against Asian Americans is not just isolated violent attacks by bad actors; it is also a system of policy and a legacy of dehumanization.”

8. There’s No Such Thing as a Good Landlord

Now for a message we can all get behind: Most landlords kinda suck. As part of Teen Vogue ’s housing package, Little Boxes , Tyra Bosnic wrote about her own mother, the kind of well-meaning, mom-and-pop landlady who often shows up in news coverage. Bosnic argued that even the best intentioned landlords are part of a horrific system that, as we’ve seen during the pandemic, often leaves people struggling to afford rent, living in dilapidated homes, or even getting evicted. Said Bosnic, “There’s power in realizing everyone has a right to a home.” 

9. The Israeli Government’s Violence Doesn’t Represent My Judaism

The evictions of several Palestinian families from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah ignited days of shocking violence in the region. The Israeli government’s bombing campaign ultimately killed more than 230 Palestinians, including 66 children, and injured nearly 2,000. Blair Nodelman, a Jewish American, wrote about her adamant disagreement with Israel’s leaders. “I believe cloaking state-sponsored violence as a religious and cultural debate not only diminishes the true beauty of Judaism, but also monopolizes our own trauma to ensure that a critique of Israel is viewed as antisemitic,” Nodelman said . What her Judaism taught her is the “abhorrence of oppression, and the sacred task of improving the world.”

10. Service Workers Aren’t Returning to Work Because They Don’t Get Paid Enough

All those “now hiring” signs plastered across businesses in your neighborhood are there for a reason. As many stores reopened this spring and summer, thanks to the vaccine rollout, many workers declined to return to low-wage gigs in retail and fast food. Why? They feared contracting COVID, lacked childcare, had more savings than usual because of pandemic unemployment programs, or the wages on offer were just too low. Teen Vogue ’s Black Canary columnist Kandist Mallett said it shouldn’t be a surprise that people aren’t willingly opting into being exploited for pathetic wages — and that we shouldn’t have to settle for those wages. “There was a lesson to be learned over the past year,” Mallett wrote . “Life is fragile, the future is not predictable, and normal is whatever we make it.”

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December 17, 2021

Nieman reports’ top 5 opinion pieces of 2021, as 2021 winds down, here are 5 opinion pieces from the past year we at nieman reports think are worth a (re)read, tagged with.

Artist and mother stand in front of George Floyd mural

Artist Alex Roman Jr. (aka Donkeeboy) and his mother Sylvia (Donkeemom) in front of their George Floyd mural in Houston, Texas David “Odiwams” Wright

The past year has brought a host of new challenges for journalism: the ongoing pandemic, a new presidency, increasing extremism following Jan. 6, to name a few. Nieman Reports’ columnists and writers have addressed these and other challenges, with nuanced analysis and insightful commentary. From the importance of obituaries to the need to publish salary ranges for journalism jobs, here are five of Nieman Reports’ most thought-provoking opinion pieces of 2021:

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1. The Real Meaning of “He’s No Angel” for Journalism

In June 2020, Alex Roman Jr. and his mother Sylvia painted one of the most iconic art pieces after the murder of George Floyd: a mural in Houston, Texas of Floyd with angel wings, the words “forever breathing in our hearts” written above him. That image of Floyd as angelic invites journalists to reconsider the language they use around crime and police brutality, argues Austin Bogues, a commentary editor at USA Today. Journalists can sometimes gravitate toward black-and-white portrayals of crime victims: They were innocent and angelic, or they were evil beyond redemption. Bogues insists that most of us are somewhere in between. Floyd, for one, was a loving father and a star basketball player, but also a man struggling with addiction. “Journalists don’t need to make anyone into an angel or a demon,” Bogues writes. “Instead we need to capture the nuances of their humanity.”

2. “A Wake in Words”: The Importance of Obituaries During — and After — the Pandemic

Since the pandemic’s start, more than 800,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 — a loss that is felt more acutely when we remember how early restrictions barred many communities from grieving together. Though in-person funerals came to a halt last year, Maureen O’Donnell highlights one way that communities stayed together when social distancing requirements kept them physically apart: obituaries. An obit writer for The Chicago Sun-Times, O’Donnell reflects on the invaluable histories, identities, and values that obituaries capture about a community, and how the pandemic is prompting newsrooms to preserve them. As newsrooms shrink and obituaries become outsourced, O’Donnell makes an impassioned argument for why news organizations should continue to invest in obituaries after the pandemic. Unless we do, says O’Donnell, “one fundamental way of keeping people together — and informed — will be lost.”

3. Why Newsrooms Should Publish Salary Ranges with Every Job Posting

Many journalists searching for media jobs are familiar with the process of going through multiple applications, interviews, and editing tests without knowing the answer to one essential question: How much does this job pay? Kami Rieck, a social media editor at Bloomberg Opinion, argues that for news organizations to truly be transparent and fair, they must publish salary ranges with every job posting. Doing so not only saves applicants hours of unpaid time spent interviewing only to discover that the job doesn’t pay a livable wage, but that transparency also creates more diverse newsrooms and helps address pay disparities. Publishing salary ranges might not solve the issue of pay equity once and for all, Rieck writes — but it’s a great place to start.

 4.  What Are We Missing in The Afghanistan Story?

When Kabul collapsed into the hands of the Taliban in August, many were quick to compare the events to the fall of Saigon. Columnist Issac Bailey proposes a different paradigm: The best parallel to Afghanistan today is not Vietnam in 1975, but Baghdad in 2003. As hundreds of cheerful U.S. soldiers toppled the city’s statue of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi citizens were about to enter a long and brutal war — and journalists shied away from asking the tough questions that would have helped audiences understand the implications of the U.S. invasion. “Had we done a better job two decades ago asking questions and looking beyond our kneejerk responses to powerful images, would Afghanistan have become the nation’s longest war ever?” Bailey asks.

5. How Journalism Moves Forward in an Age of Disinformation and Distrust

In a time marked by a deadly pandemic, police brutality, war, rising authoritarianism, and more, it often feels as though the world is caving in. HuffPost editor-in-chief Danielle Belton offers a word of advice for journalists trying to navigate the chaos of our current moment: If you’re going through hell, keep going. Belton reminds us of the important role journalism has in truth-telling amid a hell of disinformation and disruption. “I choose progress,” Belton writes, “a newsroom that is more diverse and representative of our society, a press that is more nimble and adaptive, an office that is your coffee table or kitchen table or whatever you’ve fashioned as a desk in your home, one that is compassionate and empathetic towards those in the field every day, mired in the business of muck, and one that is resilient in the face of the apocalypse.”

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The 10 Most Popular Articles in 2021 (So Far)

Leading through change, hybrid work environments, and developing strategy for the post-pandemic era are among the most popular topics for readers in recent months.

opinion articles examples 2021

  • Workplace, Teams, & Culture
  • Leading Change
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opinion articles examples 2021

Following one of the most disruptive years in recent memory, 2021 has offered up many challenges and questions for managers: How can they keep teams safe and engaged in their work when they return to offices? How can they develop new skills and strategies at a time when things aren’t quite back to normal?

In the first half of the year, the most popular topics among readers have dived into answering these types of questions, with a focus on returning to physical offices, implementing hybrid work models, and redesigning organizational culture and strategy for the post-pandemic era. Other core issues for readers include understanding employee productivity and resilience, overcoming leadership failure, and developing strategies that can stand up against uncertainty and change.

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The following are the 10 most popular articles of the year so far. We hope they are inspiring and instructive for you and your teams in the months ahead.

#1 The Future of Team Leadership Is Multimodal

Robert hooijberg and michael watkins.

The COVID-19 pandemic has driven a transformation in the ways we work by accelerating a shift to hybrid virtual and in-person models and requiring a fundamental change in the skills team leaders need to succeed. Leaders will need to play four roles as they adapt to managing a hybrid workforce.

#2 Redesigning the Post-Pandemic Workplace

Gerald c. kane, rich nanda, anh phillips, and jonathan copulsky.

As organizations plan for ways to bring remote employees back to the workplace, they should take advantage of the opportunity to rethink how and where work is best done, and how to combine the best aspects of remote and colocated work.

#3 The Future of Work Is Through Workforce Ecosystems

Elizabeth j. altman, david kiron, jeff schwartz, and robin jones.

Today’s leaders need best practices for dealing strategically and operationally with a distributed, diverse workforce that crosses internal and external boundaries. The authors contend that the best way to address the shift to managing all types of workers is through the lens of a workforce ecosystem — a structure that consists of interdependent actors, from within the organization and beyond, working to pursue both individual and collective goals.

#4 How to Prevent the Return to Offices From Being an Emotional Roller Coaster

Liz fosslien and mollie west-duffy.

Leaders can take proactive steps to make workers feel more comfortable about going back to in-person work by being transparent, surfacing concerns early on, involving employees in the planning process, and highlighting potential benefits.

#5 A Framework for Innovation in the COVID-19 Era and Beyond

Johnathan cromwell and blade kotelly.

The past year and a half has demonstrated how important it is for organizations and leaders to become more comfortable with ambiguity. By orienting their organizations within the authors’ innovation framework, company leaders can better understand how they weathered that uncertainty and leverage newfound innovation skills for long-term success.

#6 Why So Many Data Science Projects Fail to Deliver

Mayur p. joshi, ning su, robert d. austin, and anand k. sundaram.

Many companies are unable to consistently gain business value from their investments in big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. A study of the data science functions and initiatives in three of India’s largest private-sector banks identifies five obstacles to successful data science projects and suggests remedies that can help companies obtain more benefit from their data science investments.

#7 Why Good Arguments Make Better Strategy

Jesper b. sørensen and glenn r. carroll.

Sustainable success happens only for a set of logically interconnected reasons — what the authors call strategy arguments . They’ve developed a flexible system of three activities — constructive debate, iterative visualization, and logical formalization — to help leaders facilitate such arguments.

#8 How to Combat Virtual Meeting Fatigue

Katie kavanagh, nicole voss, liana kreamer, and steven g. rogelberg.

Employee data shows that people find virtual meetings draining because of their scheduling and structure. Leaders can make meetings more effective and less fatiguing by incorporating feedback from their teams.

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#9 the top 10 findings on resilience and engagement, marcus buckingham.

The ADP Research Institute conducted a global study of resilience and engagement levels across 25 countries in 2020 to help leaders become more engaged and resilient in their own lives and identify ways leaders can build engagement and resilience in their employees.

#10 Why Good Leaders Fail

Morela hernandez, jasmien khattab, and charlotte hoopes.

It’s hard to understand why successful leaders suddenly fail to meet expectations — what the authors term leader derailment . While personalities are sometimes to blame, organizational context plays a significant role. Companies can help prevent derailment by identifying the most challenging demands leaders must overcome early on and providing them with better support systems.

About the Author

Ally MacDonald ( @allymacdonald ) is senior editor at MIT Sloan Management Review .

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December 23, 2022

Editors’ Picks: Our Favorite Opinions of 2022

Our opinion section took us to the front lines of COVID, revealed how racists misuse evolutionary biology, illuminated a mental health epidemic in kids, and more

By Megha Satyanarayana

A woman shown from behind amid thousands of white flags at a COVID memorial at the National Mall.

A woman watches white flags at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in September 2021. More than 660,000 white flags were installed here to honor Americans who have lost their lives to the COVID pandemic.

Chen Mengtong/China News Service via Getty Images

A year of incredible science news was complemented with wide-ranging commentary at Scientific American . Our opinion section featured some of the best and brightest minds, taking us to the front lines of COVID, teaching us about the many fraught Supreme Court decisions involving science and evidence, and more. We learned, for example, about the pitfalls of artificial intelligence, how racists misuse evolutionary biology, and how our children’s troubled mental health is another ongoing epidemic. Whether they were thought-provoking, deeply moving or challenged long-held beliefs, here are some of our editors’ favorite opinion articles of 2022.

We Asked GPT-3 to Write an Academic Paper about Itself—Then We Tried to Get It Published

This year, language models proved they can write humanlike text, with one AI chatbot generating such impressive responses that it convinced an engineer it was sentient. But once we have AI-generated text, what do we do with it—we have systems that we use for human writing, but can they accommodate something not written by a human? I enjoyed how Almira Osmanovic Thunström explores these issues in her essay about using GPT-3 to produce an academic paper , and the very human ethical questions that arose when she decided to submit the paper for publication.

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— Sophie Bushwick, Tech Editor

Exploration Is Fundamental to Human Success

I thought it was novel for us to use the Agenda (editorial) section of the magazine, to be uplifting and inspirational about science itself—we being a science magazine! Once in a while it’s valuable to remind readers, and ourselves, that exploration and discovery are cool , and fundamentally important to improving our lives. I’m also glad we painted scientists as explorers; hopefully that will help encourage younger people to consider a science career.

— Mark Fischetti, Senior Editor for Sustainability

Space Elevators Are Less Sci-Fi Than You Think

Space elevators have long been a part of science fiction, but Stephen Cohen thinks they could one day be reality . In an engaging op-ed, he takes us through his research on the topic via years of conversations with friends and colleagues, against the backdrop of his beleaguered wife, who wants nothing more than a new topic of conversation around the dinner table. This witty and charming essay is rife with fascinating descriptions of physics and infused with optimism that one day, we will be able to transport people and stuff into orbit more easily than riding in rockets, and we will thrive in space.

— Clara Moskowitz, Senior Editor, Space and Physics

From One Dying Breath to the Next

The COVID pandemic gave the general public a crash course in infectious disease science and terminology. But like me, many of us didn’t have a full understanding of what it was like on the front lines. The opinion piece by respiratory therapist Victor Ruiz brought me into his world, on the front lines. He also brought so much perspective to a struggle I had the privilege of never having to think about—how to be the one who says goodbye to a stranger who should be taking their last breaths alongside family and loved ones. Ruiz’s piece broadened my insight into the challenges of working in health care during a pandemic and the lasting impact that has.

— Jeanna Bryner, Managing Editor

Pediatric Gun Deaths Are a Massive Problem in the U.S.

The epidemic of gun deaths in the U.S. is heartbreaking—even more so because it’s preventable. More children in the country now die from guns than from car crashes, cancer or any other type of disease. Emergency physicians Eric Fleegler and Lois Lee explain how this came to be a uniquely American problem , and what we as a society can do to mitigate it, taking lessons from the automobile industry and other areas where we have successfully reduced unnecessary deaths. And let’s face it: every child gun death is unnecessary—and unthinkable.

—Tanya Lewis, Senior Editor, Health & Medicine.

The Antiscience Supreme Court Is Hurting the Health of Americans

There was a time when the Supreme Court viewed scientific expertise as a central guide to protecting public health through policy. This powerful essay by Wendy Parmet examines the ever-evolving relationship between science and the highest court in the land over the course of decades. It also provides crucial context for the worrying antiscience trend and the rejection of expertise, science and data we’ve witnessed in this year’s court rulings. I recommend following up this essay with Parmet’s fascinating longer analysis of the dynamic between states’ and federal rights over matters of science and health policy.

— Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor

Contagions Worse than COVID Will Prevail If Neglect of Global Public Health Continues

Science journalism—or any journalism—always tries to look ahead to see what can be learned from major societal upheavals and to point to what might be done to avoid running headlong toward a new catastrophe. One painful lesson from COVID is that we (and the world) have failed to fix public health or even make major strides to achieve that goal. We are at risk again of another pandemic, and our willingness to do what is needed to prepare for the next one or the one after that has greatly diminished. That’s why I wrote this editorial —as a reminder of our continuing inability to learn from an experience that none of us will forget.

— Gary Stix, Senior Editor, Mind & Brain

Artificial General Intelligence Is Not as Imminent as You Might Think

Artificial general intelligence, or “AI that has the flexibility and resourcefulness of human intelligence,” is still far from reality. But if you’ve been listening to the effusive hype from the tech companies that are working on these products, such capabilities are already here. One of the problems, Gary Marcus explains , is that “the biggest teams of researchers in AI are no longer to be found in the academy, where peer review was the coin of the realm, but in corporations.” It’s a powerful reminder that basic, foundational science in the field is still sorely missing—even if the companies want investors to believe otherwise.  

— Jen Schwartz, Senior Editor, Features

Nurses Struggle Through a New COVID Wave with Rage and Compassion

We started the pandemic celebrating “health care heroes” and then quickly forgot about them as we argued about masks and vaccines and mandates and the reality of the disease. Kathryn Ivey reminded us what was happening in hospitals in poetic writing, talking about the anger over our ignorance, the frustration, the endless grief and the refusal to give up. The story brought tears to my eyes when I read the first draft and again when I reread it just now. “This is what it is to be a nurse: facing that darkness and telling it that you are not afraid.”

— Josh Fischman, Senior Editor

Children’s Risk of Suicide Increases on School Days

Pediatric suicide is hard to think about, but we can’t begin to solve the problem unless we understand the factors underlying it. As an emergency pediatric psychiatrist, Tyler Black knows how the stress of school can drive kids toward mental health crisis , but he has also looked into the data to confirm what he has observed in his work. Creating the graphics for this piece was jarring for me (a parent whose child is just beginning his school career) because the patterns are so stark. But the greatest strength of the essay is that Black offers solutions, and they are all eminently doable if we decide to make kids’ mental health a priority.

— Amanda Montañez, Associate Graphics Editor

There Is Nothing Normal about One Million People Dead from COVID

I think we’d all love to be done with the COVID pandemic, but the COVID pandemic is not done with us. As Tanya Lewis, one of our health editors at Scientific American, wrote earlier this year, people, not science, determine when a pandemic is over . But it’s not just any people—it’s people with power and motivation to claim that we shouldn’t worry so much about death or disability or spreading death and disability. Steven Thrasher, a Scientific American columnist and author of a new book on The Viral Underclass , wrote a powerful essay saying that we must not accept or normalize the horrible toll of COVID . When he wrote the commentary, one million people had died in the U.S. It didn’t and doesn’t have to be this way. Better access to health care , more equitable public health , more compassion and less politicization could stop the United States’ continued loss of life expectancy —we just lost 26 years’ worth of progress !—while other countries recover from the pandemic. 

— Laura Helmuth, Editor in Chief

Cities Build Better Biologists

Having spent much of my adult life in large American cities, I have seen all manner of urban wildlife, but it took this essay for me to make the connection back to science—and scientists. I, like so many other people, saw ecology as the study of unpopulated areas. Nearly all of the ecologists I’ve met in my careers have been white. In writing this essay, Nyeema C. Harris took us into her upbringing, sharing vulnerable moments to challenge our views on what ecologists look like, and what ecological spaces look like . I think about my city differently now, and the complexity of the ecosystems therein. One of my goals for the opinion section is to bring in work that will make you go “Oh cool!,” that will make you see the world a bit differently, and this essay is one of the finest examples of that in 2022.

— Megha Satyanarayana, Chief Opinion Editor

opinion articles examples 2021

Enago Academy

How to Effectively Structure an Opinion Article

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Opinion articles present the researcher’s viewpoints on the strengths and limitations of a scientific hypothesis or theories. Consequently, they make us think about where we stand! It helps us evaluate where we are heading to and what should we do to meet the rapidly changing research trends. This form of writing involves constructive criticism. These articles are intended to encourage scientific discourse that defies the current state of knowledge in that specific field.  As an esteemed scientist you get the satisfaction of expressing your unique perspectives in a competitive manner. Again, it is undoubtedly the most-read section of a journal. In the best case, it could also inspire decision-making!

Characteristics of an Opinion Article

Opinion articles are written to share an author’s perspective on a contemporary issue. It must add significant value to the scientific literature pool. Additionally, unlike original research articles, it is variant that is briefer, crisper and has a clear point of view. Indeed, it is also equally important that the authors present a well-balanced overview of the field in terms of research representation for all the concerned groups. Indeed, the fundamental idea of encouraging opinion pieces is to stimulate healthy debates about new research. Moreover, they assist in discussing possible consequences or effects of new research, provide a new framework for an old existing problem or any current issue.

Structure of an Opinion Article

Opinion pieces may not strictly follow the IMRaD format . The author has to ensure that ideas are logical and presented in a coherent manner. Opinion article are usually around 2000-3000 words and have an accompanying short abstract of about 150-300 words. It may have a minimum of 5 to 10 references and one or two tables or figures at the maximum.

Generate a concise and specific title that clearly reflects the idea of the article.

For instance, “What is the impact of factor ABC on subject PQR: A systematic analysis” or “ Is A a risk factor for B: a case control study”

In addition, provide the complete list of authors, their full names and institutional addresses. Clearly indicate the corresponding author.

The abstract must be a succinct summary of around 150 words that briefly explains the significance and relevance of the article. You may include the background, the main body, followed by a short conclusion. Do not add any citations in the abstract. Abbreviations and acronyms may be added if absolutely essential. Furthermore, ensure to spell them correctly. In certain cases, the journals may not require an abstract at all.

Provide 4-6 keywords relevant to your subject of discussion. This helps in improving the visibility of the article.

Introduction

Provide background information with a brief summary of existing literature. Once you establish the base, present your statement of purpose towards the end.

The main body must be logical and well-structured. Ensure that every viewpoint is presented in a lucid manner, making it easy to read and review. Introduce your topic and outline all the existing opinions and perspectives about the issue. In addition, always make sure that the opinions or models have strong and credible supporting evidence. Add relevant, meaningful and informative subheadings to the article for better distinction of arguments.

Summarize your arguments with evidence that supports your statement. Furthermore, discuss the applications and implications of your opinions. You may also recommend future directions for research. It is also important to mention any limitations or shortcomings related to your opinion piece for an unbiased overview.

Declarations in An Opinion Article

Some journals require a declaration section that includes the following:

  • Authors must disclose any financial or non-financial competing interests.

2. Authors must provide ethics approval and consent to participation in the study (if human subjects/ human tissue/ human data are involved). Mention the ethics statement and the name of the ethics committee that approved the study.

3. Consent for publication for any human data involved in the report.

4. Availability of data and materials statement must include information about the source of data supporting your findings reported in the article. You may also provide hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets that were refereed to, analyzed or generated during the course of your study. Providing the sources help other to accurately interpret, replicate and build upon the published data. However, please refrain sharing data that may compromise individual privacy.

Examples of data availability statements may include:

  • The datasets analyzed/generated during the present study can be availed from [Name of the repository and web link to the dataset].
  • All the data analysed or generated during the present study have been included in the supplementary files.
  • The datasets analysed/referred to/generated during the present study are available from the corresponding author on rational and valid request.

5. Clearly state the funding sources and their role in the design of the study, data collection and analysis, interpretation of data and in the writing of the article.

6. Individual author’s contributions should be specified.

Have you ever drafted an opinion piece? What challenges did you face? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below. If you have any questions related writing and publishing good opinion pieces, post them here and our experts will be happy to answer them! You can also visit our Q&A forum for frequently asked questions related to  research writing and publishing answered by our team that comprises subject-matter experts, eminent researchers, and publication experts.

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Supreme court appears unlikely to kick trump off colorado ballot.

In a full courtroom, the audience looks on as a lawyer stands and discusses his case with all nine justices on the bench.

The Supreme Court on Thursday appeared ready to hold that Colorado cannot exclude former President Donald Trump from the ballot based on his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol. During an oral argument that lasted for more than two hours, justices of all ideological stripes questioned the wisdom of allowing a state to make its own decisions about whether a candidate should appear on the ballot, both because of the effect that such decisions would have on the rest of the country and because of the hurdles that courts would face in reviewing those decisions.

The case centers on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was enacted in the wake of the Civil War to disqualify individuals from holding office who had previously served in the federal or state government before the war but then supported the Confederacy. It provides (as relevant here) that no one “shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State,” if that person had previously sworn, “as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States” to support the Constitution but then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the federal government.

Last fall a group of Colorado voters went to court, seeking to have Trump disqualified under Section 3 from appearing on the ballot. A trial court agreed that Trump had engaged in insurrection, but it nonetheless declined to remove him from the ballot because it concluded that the presidency is not an “office … under the United States,” and the president is not an “officer of the United States.”

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled on Dec. 19 that Trump is ineligible to be president under Section 3 and should not be listed on the primary ballot. The court put its ruling on hold to give the Supreme Court time to weigh in, which the justices agreed to do on Jan. 5.

Representing the former president, lawyer Jonathan Mitchell told the justices that states cannot use Section 3 to bar Trump from running for office – that is, to exclude him from the ballot – because Section 3 also leaves open the possibility that Congress could, by a two-thirds vote, lift the ban that Section 3 would otherwise impose after Trump is elected but before he actually takes office.

And indeed, Mitchell said in response to questioning by Chief Justice John Roberts, under that rationale a state could not bar a candidate from the ballot even if he publicly admitted to being an insurrectionist. 

Mitchell compared the facts before the court to an effort by a state to require candidates for Congress to live in the state before Election Day, when they are only required to live there by the time they are elected. In both scenarios, Mitchell contended, states are “accelerating the deadline to meet a constitutionally imposed qualification.” Upholding the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision, he cautioned, would “take away the votes of potentially tens of millions” of voters.

Lawyer talking to justices on the bench

Jason Murray argues on behalf of the Colorado voters. (William Hennessy)

Jason Murray, representing the voters challenging Trump’s placement on the Colorado ballot, began his argument by painting a grave picture of the events of Jan. 6, telling the justices that “our nation’s capitol came under violent assault” for the first time since the War of 1812. “For the first time in history,” Murray continued, “the attack was incited by a sitting president of the United States to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power.” “By engaging in an insurrection against the Constitution,” Murray said, Trump “disqualified himself from public office,” and now argues that the Supreme Court should create a special exception that – as a former president who did not hold office before being elected to the White House – would apply only to him.

A central issue at Thursday’s argument was whether the question of how Section 3’s ban on government service by individuals who have “engaged in insurrection” can be enforced – do states like Colorado have the power to enforce it themselves, as the voters contend, or (as Trump argues) can it only be enforced through laws passed by Congress?

Some justices looked to history, pressing Murray to provide examples of other scenarios in which states have relied on Section 3 to disqualify candidates for federal office. Murray pointed to an 1868 congressional election in Georgia, as well as to state elections and candidates disqualified by Congress, and he noted that the dearth of examples was “not surprising” because elections operated differently then, with ballots for political parties rather than individual candidates. Therefore, he reasoned, “there wouldn’t have been a process for determining before an election whether a candidate was qualified.”

But that answer did not mollify Justice Clarence Thomas, who observed that the “plethora of Confederates” still present in public life in the post-Civil War era would suggest that this issue would come up.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh echoed Thomas’ emphasis on the absence of any historical examples as evidence that states do not have the standalone power to disqualify candidates under Section 3. He cited Griffin’s Case , an 1869 decision by Chief Justice Salmon Chase, serving on a lower court. In that case, Chase ruled, Section 3 can only be enforced through laws passed by Congress.

Although the decision is not binding on the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh suggested that one year later Congress had Griffin’s Case in mind when it enacted the Enforcement Act of 1870, which gave the Department of Justice the power to bring lawsuits seeking to disqualify federal officials. For 155 years, Kavanaugh concluded, no state has attempted to disqualify a federal officer from the ballot under Section 3 because “there’s been a settled understanding” that states don’t have that power. Moreover, he added, “Congress can change that” but hasn’t done so.

Murray pushed back, suggesting that no state had tried to disqualify candidates for federal office because there had not been a need to do so. Virtually all former Confederates had received amnesty by 1876, so that there would no longer be a need to disqualify them from the ballot, he observed. And since then, he contended, there had been no reason to invoke Section 3 because the country had not previously experienced anything like the Jan. 6 attacks.

Justice Samuel Alito was unmoved by this line of argument. He observed that there were no presidential impeachments between 1868 – when President Andrew Johnson was impeached – and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998. But since 1998, he stressed, there have been three – Clinton and the two Trump impeachments in 2019 and 2021.

But on the question of enforcement, the court focused even more specifically on the possible implications of upholding the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision. Justice Elena Kagan was among the most vocal in expressing her concerns. Why, she queried, should one state be able to disqualify a candidate from the ballot and, in so doing, effectively determine who becomes the president of the United States? Rather than sounding like an issue for an individual state to decide, she said, that “sounds awfully national to me.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett appeared to agree. If the court upholds the Colorado ruling, she posited, it will as a practical matter decide the issue for all the other states. Like some of her colleagues, she envisioned possible logistical problems, observing that the court would have to make its decision using the facts developed in whatever state-court case made its way to them first. In a scenario in which the factual record isn’t well developed, she asked, how should the court review those findings? It “just doesn’t seem like a state call,” she concluded.

Alito chimed in, noting that other logistical problems could arise if states reach different conclusions about issues arising from Section 3, such as whether a candidate “engaged in insurrection.” In that case, Alito asked, how should the Supreme Court proceed? Would it need to decide on rules of evidence, determine who would bear the burden to show that the candidate was an insurrectionist, or even hold its own trial?

But even more broadly, both Alito and Roberts were wary of what Alito characterized as the potentially “cascading” effect of upholding the Colorado decision. If the Supreme Court were to rule that Trump can be removed from the Colorado ballot, Roberts said, it will undoubtedly lead to efforts to disqualify the Democratic candidate for president. “And some of those will succeed,” leading to a scenario in which only a “handful of states … are going to decide the presidential election. That’s a pretty daunting consequence,” Roberts concluded.

Woman speaking to three justices

Colorado Solicitor General Shannon Stevenson argues for the Colorado Secretary of State.  (William Hennessy)

Colorado Solicitor General Shannon Stevenson, arguing on behalf of Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, tried to allay some of the justices’ fears. She told the court that disparities between the ballots in different states are a feature, rather than a bug, of the democratic process, and she urged the justices to allow the process to play out even if it becomes messy. “Congress,” she stressed, “can act at any time if it thinks” the process has truly “run amok.”

And Stevenson downplayed the possibility of retaliation against Democratic candidates if the court were to uphold the state court’s decision, arguing that “we have to have faith in our system” and in the “institutions in place to handle those types of allegations.”

But after more than two hours of argument, the justices appeared uninclined to agree with Stevenson and leave the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision in place.

There is no way to know when the justices will issue their decision. The Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling is currently on hold, so Trump will remain on the ballot there unless the justices decide otherwise, but the court is nonetheless likely to act relatively quickly to resolve the issue because of its significance for other states where challenges to his eligibility are pending.

This article was originally published at Howe on the Court .

Posted in Merits Cases

Cases: Trump v. Anderson

Recommended Citation: Amy Howe, Supreme Court appears unlikely to kick Trump off Colorado ballot , SCOTUSblog (Feb. 8, 2024, 3:14 PM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/02/supreme-court-appears-unlikely-to-kick-trump-off-colorado-ballot/

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Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle in American Sniper; a mourner after the Paris terrorist attacks; Nadiya Hussain, winner of the Great British Bake Off.

The 60 most-read Opinion pieces of 2015

Here’s our digest of the year’s biggest Opinion pieces – including four that were originally published in previous years. In order …

1. Someone stole naked pictures of me. This is what I did about it, by Emma Holten

2. The real American Sniper was a hate-filled killer. Why are simplistic patriots treating him as a hero?, by Lindy West

3. Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq, by Seumas Milne

4. Indonesia is burning. So why is the world looking away?, by George Monbiot

5. I was held hostage by Isis. They fear our unity more than our airstrikes, by Nicolas Hénin

6. Don’t rush to Nepal to help. Read this first , by Claire Bennett

7. Stephen Fry’s engagement: what’s wrong with age-gap relationships? , by Hannah Jane Parkinson

8. Steve Bell on the Charlie Hebdo attack

9. Britain’s criminally stupid attitudes to race and immigration are beyond parody , by Frankie Boyle

10. Mindless terrorists? The truth about Isis is much worse , by Scott Atran

11. Dear Katie Hopkins. Stop making life harder for disabled people , by Lucy Hawking

12. A picture of loneliness: you are looking at the last male northern white rhino , by Jonathan Jones

A northern white rhinoceros protected by armed guards in Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy.

13. David Cameron hasn’t the faintest idea how deep his cuts go. This letter proves it , by George Monbiot

14. What do doctors say to ‘alternative therapists’ when a patient dies? Nothing. We never talk , by Ranjana Srivastava

15. Aspirational parents condemn their children to a desperate, joyless life , by George Monbiot

16. If you don’t understand how people fall into poverty, you’re probably a sociopath , by Lucy Mangan

17. If your idea of hell is sitting next to Kate Moss on an easyJet flight, you must be dead inside , Suzanne Moore

18. Prisons that withhold menstrual pads humiliate women and violate basic rights , by Chandra Bozelko

19. My boyfriend ‘sort-of’ raped me. But I didn’t break up with him, by Monica Tan

20. The ‘Dear Fat People’ video is tired, cruel and lazy – but I still fight for the woman who made it , by Lindy West

21. How not to talk to someone with depression , by SE Smith

22. Sonny Bill Williams’s thoughtless act of generosity has ruined sport for ever , by Stuart Heritage

All Blacks player Sonny Bill Williams gave his Rugby World Cup gold medal to New Zealand fan Charlie Line.

23. The thoroughly humiliating and extremely satisfying demise of Tony Abbott , by First Dog on the Moon

24. Germany won’t spare Greek pain – it has an interest in breaking us , by Yanis Varoufakis

25. Is women’s visible pubic hair really so shocking that it must be censored? , by Jessica Valenti

26. What is love? Five theories on the greatest emotion of all , by a panel of writers

27. How do you know your cat loves you? Let me count 25 ways , by Fay Schopen

28. Testino’s portrait of William and Kate is a sickly sweet lie , by Jonathan Jones

29. Apocalypse now: has the next giant financial crash already begun? , by Paul Mason

30. The view from Middle England: ‘If the Scottish get in with Labour ... we’re done for’ , video by John Harris

31. What if David Cameron is an evil genius? , by Frankie Boyle

32. Greece and Spain helped postwar Germany recover. Spot the difference , by Nick Dearden

33. Social media is protecting men from periods, breast milk and body hair , by Jessica Valenti

34. Jeremy Corbyn a non-conformist? He couldn’t be more British if he bled tea , by Frankie Boyle

35. It’s not always easy to be a Joni Mitchell fan, but her illness devastates me , by Linda Grant

36. J’ai été otage de l’État islamique. Daesh craint plus notre unité que nos frappes aériennes , by Nicolas Hénin

37. Don’t let the maverick act fool you – Jeremy Clarkson’s the ultimate insider , by Hadley Freeman

38. I loved the honesty of Tinder – then I met Mr No Sex Before Marriage , Desiree Akhavan

39. The most dangerous drug isn’t meow meow. It isn’t even alcohol ... by Charlie Brooker

40. When I lost my hands making flatscreens I can’t afford, nobody would help me , by Rosa Moreno

41. Pubic hair has a job to do – stop shaving and leave it alone , Emily Gibson

42. Britain is heading for another 2008 crash: here’s why , by David Graeber

43. If you laughed when 50 Cent went bankrupt, you don’t understand hip-hop , by Andrew Emery

50 Cent

44. There may be flowing water on Mars. But is there intelligent life on Earth? , by George Monbiot

45. Sia’s video: let’s be wary of seeing paedophilia everywhere , Barbara Ellen

46. Depression doesn’t make you sad all the time , by SE Smith

47. Colleen McCullough: we’ll celebrate a woman for anything, as long as it’s not her talent , by Rebecca Shaw

48. Even if you hate me, please don’t take Labour over the cliff edge , by Tony Blair

49. A&E helped us through a miscarriage. Then we got a feedback text , by Anonymous

50. Young women, give up the vocal fry and reclaim your strong female voice , by Naomi Wolf

51. This black woman’s anti-Muslim rant shows how deep British racism goes , by Joseph Harker

52. Nadiya Hussain has won so much more than the Great British Bake Off , by Remona Aly

53. How a corporate cult captures and destroys our best graduates , by George Monbiot

54. I’m tired of being kind to creepy men in order to stay safe , by Daisy Buchanan

55. Don’t blame depression for the Germanwings tragedy , by Masuma Rahim

56. Angela Merkel has a red and a yellow button. One ends the crisis. Which does she push? , by Yanis Varoufakis

German chancellor Angela Merkel

57. This week I may be jailed for writing a book on human rights abuses , by Rafael Marques de Morais

58. You’ve been asked to have your say on the NHS. You just don’t know about it , by Ann Robinson

59. A (very) rough guide to America from an Englishman in New York , by Paul Owen

60. Turkey could cut off Islamic State’s supply lines. So why doesn’t it? , by David Graeber

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Shooting after Chiefs’ Super Bowl parade latest violence to mar sports celebrations

Law enforcement surged to the area of a shooting at the end of the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl parade as terrified fans in the crowd running for cover. Lisa Money first thought somebody might be joking until she saw the SWAT team jumping over the fence.

Law enforcement personnel arrive to investigate following a shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs NFL football Super Bowl celebration in Kansas City, Mo., Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2024. Multiple people were injured, a fire official said.(AP Photo/Reed Hoffmann)

Law enforcement personnel arrive to investigate following a shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs NFL football Super Bowl celebration in Kansas City, Mo., Wednesday, Feb. 14, 2024. Multiple people were injured, a fire official said.(AP Photo/Reed Hoffmann)

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The shooting after the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory parade Wednesday was just the latest example of violence erupting during a championship celebration.

Here are other shootings that have taken place over the last decade either the night a team won a league championship or during the ensuing parade or rally.

JUNE 2016: CLEVELAND CAVALIERS

Police said a person was shot twice in the leg and received injuries that weren’t life-threatening during a parade and rally for the Cavaliers’ NBA championship.

JUNE 2019: TORONTO RAPTORS

Four people were shot and wounded at a downtown Toronto rally for the NBA champion Raptors. Police said others suffered minor injuries as they tried to get away from the shooting.

OCTOBER 2020: LOS ANGELES DODGERS

Two people were shot to death in Sylmar, California, the night the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series. Family members of Juan Carlos Guillen and Marco Antonio Vazquez said the two men were trying to stop people who were smashing car windows with baseball bats.

JULY 2021: MILWAUKEE BUCKS

Two shootings left three people wounded in downtown Milwaukee the night the Bucks won their first NBA title in 50 years. Police said the injuries weren’t life-threatening. The shootings were across the Milwaukee River from Fiserv Forum, the Bucks’ home arena.

JUNE 2022: DENVER NUGGETS

After the Nuggets’ championship parade last year, a shooting took place in downtown Denver that injured two people, though police said they didn’t believe the incident was associated with the celebration.

OCTOBER 2022: TEXAS RANGERS

An argument resulted in shots being fired at a parking lot near the Rangers’ World Series championship parade, though nobody was injured.

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Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden

It requires them to embrace an old-fashioned approach to winning a campaign..

Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app , Apple , Spotify , Amazon Music , Google or wherever you get your podcasts .]

A full transcript of this audio essay is available here:

Ezra Klein: My heart breaks a bit for Joe Biden. This is a man who has been running for president since he was young. He wins the presidency, finally, unexpectedly, when he’s old. And that age brought him wisdom. It brought an openness that hadn’t always been there in him. He’s governed as a throwback to a time before “I alone can fix it,” a time when presidents were party leaders, coalition builders.

Biden has held together a Democratic Party that could easily have splintered. Think back to the 2020 campaign, when he beat Bernie Sanders, when he beat Elizabeth Warren, when his victory was seen as, was in reality, the moderate wing triumphing over the progressive wing, the establishment over the insurgents.

But instead of making them bend the knee, instead of acting as a victor, Biden acted as a leader. He partnered with Bernie Sanders. He built the unity task forces. He integrated Warren’s and Sanders’s ideas and staff into not just his campaign but also his administration.

I had a conversation recently with Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the House progressive caucus, and I asked her why the Democratic Party hadn’t ruptured the way Republicans did. She pointed me back to that moment. Biden, she said, made this “huge attempt to pull the Democratic Party back together before the 2020 election in a way I’ve really never seen before.”

And it worked. Democrats had 50 votes in the Senate. Fifty votes that stretched from Bernie Sanders on the left all the way to Joe Manchin on the right. Biden and Chuck Schumer, they often could not lose even one of those votes, and at crucial moments, they didn’t.

With that almost-impossible-to-hold-together coalition, the Biden administration and congressional Democrats passed a series of bills — the bipartisan infrastructure deal, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act — that will make this a decade of infrastructure and invention. A decade of building, of decarbonizing, of researching. They expanded the Affordable Care Act, and it worked — more than 21 million people signed up for the A.C.A. last year, a record. They did what Democrats have promised to do forever and took at least the first steps toward letting Medicare negotiate drug prices.

And the Biden team, they said they were going to run the economy hot, that at long last, they were going to prioritize full employment, and they did. And then inflation shot up. Not just here but in Europe, in Canada, pretty much everywhere. The pandemic had twisted global supply chains and then the economy had reopened, and people desperate to live again took their pandemic savings and spent. And the Biden team, in partnership with Jerome Powell and the Federal Reserve, got the rate of inflation back down, and we are still beneath 4 percent unemployment.

And I don’t want to just skip over that accomplishment. Most economists said that could not be done. The overwhelming consensus was we were headed for a recession, that the so-called soft landing was a fantasy. It got mocked as “immaculate disinflation.” But that is what happened. We didn’t have a recession. We are still seeing strong wage gains for the poorest Americans. Inequality is down. Growth is quick. America is far stronger economically right now than Europe, than Canada, than China. You want to be us.

And yet Biden’s poll numbers are dismal. His approval rating lingers in the high 30s. Most polls show him losing to Donald Trump in 2024. Then comes the special counsel report, which finds no criminal wrongdoing in his treatment of classified information, which is — remember — the question the special counsel was appointed to investigate. But the counsel takes a drive-by on Biden’s cognitive fitness. Says a jury would think him a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” Says Biden doesn’t remember when his son Beau died.

And Biden, enraged, does what people have been asking him to do this whole time. He takes the age issue head on. And he gives a news conference full of fury.

And then, when he is about to leave, he comes back to take one more question — this one on Israel and Gaza, where he says that America is no longer lock step behind Benjamin Netanyahu’s invasion, and then describing the effort he put in getting President Sisi to open the Egyptian border for aid, he slips. He calls Sisi the president of Mexico. Makes the kind of slip anyone can make, but a kind of slip he is making too often now, a kind of slip that means more when he makes it than when someone else does.

Since the beginning of Biden’s administration, I have been asking people who work with him: How does he seem? How read in is he? What’s he like in the meetings? Maybe it’s not a great sign that I felt the need to do that, that a lot of reporters have been doing that, but still. And I am convinced, watching him, listening to the testimony of those who meet with him — not all people who like him — I am convinced he is able to do the job of the presidency. He is sharp in meetings; he makes sound judgments. I cannot point you to a moment where Biden faltered in his presidency because his age had slowed him.

But here’s the thing. I can now point you to moments when he is faltering in his campaign for the presidency because his age is slowing him. This distinction between the job of the presidency and the job of running for the presidency keeps getting muddied, including by Biden himself.

This is the question Democrats keep wanting to answer, the question the Biden administration keeps pretending only to hear: Can Biden do the job of president? But that is not the question of the 2024 campaign. The insistence that Biden is capable of being president is being used to shut down discussion of whether he’s capable of running for president.

I’ve had my own journey on this. I’ve written a number of columns about how Biden keeps proving pundits wrong, about how he’s proved me wrong. He won in 2020 despite plenty of naysayers. The Democrats won in 2022, defying predictions. I had, in 2022, been planning to write a column after the midterms saying there should be a primary because Democrats need to see how strong of a campaigner Biden still was. The test needed to be run. But when they overperformed, that drained all interest among the major possible candidates in running. That test wasn’t going to happen. But still, I thought, Biden might surprise again. I’d grown wary of underestimating him.

We had to wait till this year — till now, really — to see Biden even begin to show what he’d be like on the campaign trail. And what I think we’re seeing is that he is not up for this. He is not the campaigner he was, even five years ago. That’s not insider reporting on my part. Go watch a speech he gave in Pennsylvania, kicking off his campaign in 2019. And then go watch the speech he gave last month, in Valley Forge, kicking off his election campaign. No comparison here. Both speeches are on YouTube, and you can see it. The way he moves, the energy in his voice. The Democrats denying decline are only fooling themselves.

But even given that, I was stunned when his team declined a Super Bowl interview. Biden is not up by 12 points. He can’t coast to victory here. He is losing. He is behind in most polls. He is behind, despite everything people already know about Donald Trump. He needs to make up ground. If he does not make up ground, Trump wins.

The Super Bowl is one of the biggest audiences you will ever have. And you just skip it? You just say no?

The Biden team’s argument, to be fair, is this: Who wants to see the president during the Super Bowl, anyway? And even if they did the interview, CBS would just choose three or four minutes of a 15-minute interview to air. What if CBS chooses a clip that makes Biden look bad?

That’s all true. But that’s all true in the context of a team that does not believe that the more people see Biden, the more they will like him. There’s a reason other presidents do the Super Bowl interview. There’s a reason Biden himself did it in 2021 and 2022, that Trump said he’d gladly take Biden’s place this year.

I was talking to James Carville, who’s one of the chief strategists behind Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, and he put this really well to me. He said to me that a campaign has certain assets, but the most desirable asset is the candidate. And the Biden campaign does not deploy Biden like he is a desirable asset.

Biden has done fewer interviews than any recent president, and it’s not close. By this point in their presidencies, Barack Obama had given more than 400 interviews and Trump had given more than 300. Biden has given fewer than 100. And a bunch of them are softball interviews — he’ll go on Conan O’Brien’s podcast, or Jay Shetty’s mindfulness podcast. The Biden team says this is a strategy, that they need apolitical voters, the ones who are not listening to political media. But one, this strategy isn’t working — Biden is down, not up. And two, no one really buys this argument. I don’t buy this argument. This isn’t a strategy chosen from a full universe of options. This is a strategic adaptation to Biden’s perceived limits as a candidate. And what’s worse, it may be a wise one.

I want to say this clearly: I like Biden. I think he’s been a good president. I think he is a good president. I don’t like having this conversation. And I know a lot of liberals, a lot of Democrats are going to be furious at me for this show.

But to say this is a media invention, that people are worried about Biden’s age because the media keeps telling them to be worried about Biden’s age? If you have really convinced yourself of that, in your heart of hearts, I almost don’t know what to tell you. In poll after poll, 70 percent to 80 percent of voters are worried about his age. This is not a thing people need the media to see. It is right in front of them, and it is also shaping how Biden and his campaign are acting.

Democrats keep telling themselves, when they look at the polls, that voters will come back to Biden when the campaign starts in earnest and they begin seeing more of Trump, when they have to take what he is and what it would mean for him to return seriously.

But that is going to go both ways. When the campaign begins in earnest, they will also see much more of Joe Biden. People who barely pay attention to him now, they will be watching his speeches. They will see him on the news constantly. Will they actually like what they see? Will it comfort them?

That was why that news conference mattered. That news conference had a point. It had a purpose. The purpose was to reassure voters of Biden’s cognitive fitness, particularly his memory. And Biden couldn’t do that, not for one night, not for fewer than 15 minutes. And these kinds of gaffes have become commonplace for him. He recently said he’d been speaking to the former French president Francois Mitterrand when he meant Emmanuel Macron. He said he’d been talking to the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl when he meant Angela Merkel.

None of these matter much on their own. The human mind just does this. But it does it more as you get older. And they do matter collectively. Voters believe Biden is too old for the job he seeks. He needs to persuade them otherwise, and he is failing at that task — arguably the central task of his re-election campaign.

And that can become a self-fulfilling cycle. His staff knows that news conference was a disaster. So how will they respond? What will they do now? They will hold him back from aggressive campaigning even more, from unscripted situations. They will try to make doubly sure that it doesn’t happen again. But they need a candidate — Democrats need a candidate — who can aggressively campaign, because again — and I cannot emphasize this enough — they are currently losing.

Part of my job is talking to the kinds of Democrats who run and win campaigns constantly. All of them are worried about this. None of them say that this is an invention or not a real issue. And this is key: It’s not the age itself they are worried about. The age of 81 doesn’t mean anything. It’s the impression Biden is giving of age. Of slowness. Of frailty.

The presidency is a performance. You are not just making decisions, you are also acting out the things people want to believe about their president — that the president is in command, strong, energetic, compassionate, thoughtful, that they don’t need to worry about all that is happening in the world, because the president has it all under control.

Whether it is true that Biden has it all under control, it is not true that he seems like he does. Some political strategists I know think that’s why his poll numbers are low. That even when good things happen, people don’t really think he did them. One was telling me that what worries him most about Biden is how stable his approval rating is — it doesn’t really go up or down. Inflation has gone down a lot in recent months. People feel a lot better about the economy. You can see that in consumer sentiment data. But Biden’s approval rating, it has not gone up. His performance on Ukraine did not make it go up. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act did not make it go up. To this strategist, it looked like a lot of Americans just don’t give Biden credit for things even when he deserves them. And Biden isn’t now a capable or aggressive enough campaigner to win that credit for himself.

The arguments I see even some smart Democrats making so they don’t have to look at this directly are self-defeating. The one I hear most often is that Trump is also old. He’s 77. He also mixes up names — he recently called Nancy Pelosi Nikki Haley. He sometimes speaks in gibberish. And it’s all true. But that is a reason to nominate a candidate who can exploit the fact that Trump is old and confused. The point is not to give Trump an even match. The point is to beat Trump.

Another argument I see is that this is ageism. This is an unfair thing to point out about Biden. It is age discrimination and, I have actually seen people make this argument, age discrimination is illegal in the workplace. But it is not illegal in the electorate. If the voters are ageist and Biden loses because of it, there is no recourse. You cannot sue the voters for age discrimination.

And then there’s the argument you’ve heard on my podcast. An argument I’ve made before. Biden doesn’t look like a strong candidate, but Democrats keep on winning. Biden won in 2020. Democrats won in 2022. They’ve been winning special elections in 2023. They just won George Santos’s seat in New York. There’s an anti-MAGA majority in this country and they will come out to stop Trump. And I think that might be true. I still think Biden might win against Trump, even with all I’ve said. It’s just that there’s a very good chance he might lose. Maybe even better than even odds. And Trump is dangerous. I want better odds than that.

I think one reason Democrats react so defensively to critiques of Biden is they’ve come to a kind of fatalism. They believe it is too late to do anything else. And if it is too late to do anything else, then to talk about Biden’s age is to contribute to Donald Trump’s victory.

But that’s absurd.

It is February. Fatalism this far before the election is ridiculous. Yeah, it’s too late to throw this to primaries. But it’s not too late to do something.

So then what? Step one, unfortunately, is convincing Biden that he should not run again. That he does not want to risk being Ruth Bader Ginsburg — a heroic, brilliant public servant who caused the outcome she feared most because she didn’t retire early enough. That in stepping aside he would be able to finish out his term as a strong and focused president, and people would see the honor in what he did, in putting his country over his ambitions.

The people whom Biden listens to — Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Mike Donilon, Ron Klain, Nancy Pelosi, Anita Dunn — they need to get him to see this. Biden may come to see it himself.

I take nothing away from how hard that is, how much Biden wants to finish the job he has started, keep doing the good he believes he can do. Retirement can be, often is, a trauma. But losing to Donald Trump would be far worse.

Let’s say that happens: Biden steps aside. Then what? Well, then Democrats do something that used to be common in politics but hasn’t been in decades. They pick their nominee at the convention. This is how parties chose their nominees for most of American history. From roughly 1831 to 1968, this is how it worked. In a way, this is still how it works.

I’m going to do a whole episode on how an open convention works, so this is going to be a quick version. The way we pick nominees now is still built around conventions. When someone wins a primary or a caucus, what he actually wins is delegate slots. How that works is different in different states. Then they go to the convention to choose the actual nominee.

The whole convention structure is still there. We still use it. It is still the delegates voting at the convention. What’s different now than in the past is that most delegates arrive at the convention committed to a candidate. But without getting too into the weeds of state delegate rules here, if their candidate drops out, if Biden drops out, they can be released to vote for who they want.

The last open convention Democrats had was 1968, a disaster of a convention where the Democratic Party split between pro- and anti-Vietnam War factions, where there was violence in the streets, where Democrats lost the election.

But that’s not how most conventions have gone. It was a convention that picked Abraham Lincoln over William Seward. It was a convention that chose F.D.R. over Al Smith. I’ve been reading Ed Achorn’s book “The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History.” My favorite line in it comes from Senator Charles Sumner, who sends a welcome note to the delegates, “whose duty it will be to organize victory.”

Whose duty it will be to organize victory — I love that. That’s what a convention is supposed to do. It’s what a political party is supposed to do: organize victory. Because victory doesn’t just happen. It has to be organized.

Everybody I have talked about this, literally everybody, has brought up the same fear. Call it the Kamala Harris problem. In theory, she should be the favorite. But she polls slightly worse than Biden. Democrats don’t trust that she would be a stronger candidate. But they worry that if she wasn’t chosen it would rip the party apart. I think this is wrong on two levels.

First, I think Harris is underrated now. I’ve thought this for a while. I’ve said this before, that I think she’s going to have a good 2024. Is she a political juggernaut, a generational political talent? Probably not. But she’s a capable politician, which is one reason Biden chose her as his running mate in the first place. She has not thrived as vice president. The D.C. narrative on her has turned extremely negative. But when Kamala Harris ran campaigns as Kamala Harris, this wasn’t how she was seen. And Harris, in private settings — she’s enormously magnetic and compelling.

Her challenge would be translating that into a public persona, which is — and let’s be blunt about this — a hard thing to do when you’ve grown up in a world that has always been quick to find your faults. A world that is afraid of women being angry, of Black people being angry. A world where, for most of your life, it was demanded of you that you be cautious and careful and measured and never make a mistake. And then you get on the public stage and people say, oh, you’re too cautious and too careful and too measured. It’s a very, very, very hard bind to get out of. But maybe she can do it.

Still, it is the party’s job to organize victory. If Harris cannot convince delegates that she has the best shot at victory, she should not and probably would not be chosen. And I don’t think that would rip the party apart. There is a ton of talent in the Democratic Party right now: Gretchen Whitmer, Wes Moore, Jared Polis, Gavin Newsom, Raphael Warnock, Josh Shapiro, Cory Booker, Ro Khanna, Pete Buttigieg, Gina Raimondo, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Chris Murphy, Andy Beshear, J.B. Pritzker — the list goes on.

Some of them would make a run at the nomination. They would give speeches at the convention, and people would actually pay attention. The whole country would be watching the Democratic convention, and probably quite a bit happening in the run-up to it, and seeing what this murderer’s row of political talent could actually do. And then some ticket would be chosen based on how those people did.

Could it go badly? Sure. But that doesn’t mean it will go badly. It could make the Democrats into the most exciting political show on earth. And over there on the other side will be Trump getting nominated and a who’s who of MAGA types slavering over his leadership. The best of the Democratic Party against the worst of the Republican Party. A party that actually listened to the voters against a party that denies the outcome of the elections. A party that did something different over a party that has again nominated a threat to democracy who has never — not once — won the popular vote in a general election.

That seems like an OK contrast to me.

Yes, the Democratic Party has been winning elections recently. But it is winning those elections in part because it takes candidate recruitment seriously. That was true in 2020. Biden wasn’t the candidate that set the base’s heart aflutter, but he seemed like the candidate with the best shot at winning. So Democrats did the strategic thing and picked him. And they won. In 2022, Democrats carefully chose candidates who fit their districts, who fit their states while Republicans chose MAGA-soaked extremists. And that is why those Democrats won.

The lesson here is not that Democrats don’t need to think hard about who they run in elections. It’s that they do need to think hard about who they run in elections. And they have been. They need to be strategic, not sentimental. And they have been. Because the alternative is Donald Trump. And Donald Trump is dangerous. And right now, Donald Trump is ahead.

I have this nightmare that Trump wins in 2024. And then in 2025 and 2026, out come the campaign tell-all books, and they’re full of emails and WhatsApp messages between Biden staffers and Democratic leaders, where they’re all saying to each other, this is a disaster, he’s not going to win this, I can’t bear to watch this speech, we’re going to lose. But they didn’t say any of it publicly, they didn’t do anything, because it was too dangerous for their careers, or too uncomfortable given their loyalty to Biden.

I’ve said on the show before that we live in a strange era with the parties. We’ve gone from the cliché being that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line, to the reality being that Democrats fall in line and Republicans fall apart. I’ve mostly meant that as a critique of Republican chaos, but too much order can be its own kind of pathology. A party that is too quick to fall in line, that cannot break line, is a party that will be too slow, maybe unable, to solve hard problems.

So yes, I think Biden, as painful as this is, should find his way to stepping down as a hero. That the party should help him find his way to that, to being the thing he said he would be in 2020, the bridge to the next generation of Democrats. And then I think Democrats should meet in August at the convention to do what political parties have done there before: organize victory.

I recognize there’s going to be a lot of questions and comments and pushback to this piece. So we’re going to do an “Ask Me Anything” episode next week — on this, on 2024 broadly. We’ve set up a voice mail box, if you want to leave a message that could get played on the show. Please keep them under a minute. We’re not going to use ones that are very long. The number for that is 212-556-7300. Or you can email us, both text and a voice note, at [email protected].

You can listen to our whole conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app , Apple , Spotify , Google or wherever you get your podcasts . View a list of book recommendations from our guests here .

An image of President Joe Biden

This audio essay for “The Ezra Klein Show” was fact-checked by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , X and Threads .

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