International Olympic Committee demands criminal investigation into sexual harassment allegations.

The IBA was suspended by the International Olympic Committee in 2019.

International community criticised after joint force battling armed groups left without sufficient funding and support.

According to Amnesty International, an official total of 883 people were executed across 20 countries in 2022, marking a rise of 53% compared to figures for 2021 .

Gary Haugen was just 22 years old in the fall of 1985, when he attended a meeting that would change the course of his life. He had arrived in South Africa that summer, fresh out of Harvard, just a few days before P. W. Botha’s apartheid government declared a partial state of emergency. He was working for Michael Cassidy, the founder of African Enterprise, an organization focused on evangelizing and racial reconciliation.

Together with Desmond Tutu, the new Anglican bishop of Johannesburg, Cassidy launched the National Initiative for Reconciliation. In September, hundreds of church leaders gathered in Pietermaritzburg. Their hope was that the Church would help South Africa through the crisis. The situation was desperate enough that even leaders of the powerful Dutch Reformed Church, which was allied with the white-supremacist government and usually avoided such gatherings, attended. And on the evening of September 11, about 15 church leaders, Bblack and white, from different denominations, gathered.

[Read: How Apartheid haunts a new generation of South Africans]

The conversation was “very tense, very raw,” Haugen told me in an interview earlier this year. Bishop Tutu was one of the last people to speak; as he was preparing to do so, the leaders of the Dutch Reformed Church were uneasy, visibly stiffening. Tutu addressed his remarks directly to them.

“I just want to thank God that he brought you, my white brothers, here to South Africa,” the Anglican bishop told the Dutch Reformed Church leaders, as best Haugen recalls his words decades later. “I thank God that you came because you brought the mission hospitals, and I was born in a mission hospital. I thank God you brought the mission schools, and I went to a mission school. But most of all, my brothers, I thank God that he brought you because you brought the word of God. But now I’m going to have to open up that word of God and show you why your apartheid system is a sin.”

Tutu proceeded to do just that.

The assembled leaders later released an anti-apartheid statement, which Haugen helped draft. The following year, the Dutch Reformed Church declared that South Africa’s system of racial separation and minority white rule was morally wrong and had done the country and its people grievous harm. Three years later, in 1989, the Church declared the ideology of apartheid a sin and said that any attempt to defend it was heretical.

“We have heard from the representatives of the Dutch Reformed Church confessions of guilt with regard to the establishment, maintenance and justification of apartheid,” read a 1989 resolution approved by Reverend Allan A. Boesak, the head of the mixed-race Dutch Reformed Mission Church. “We have heard their plea for forgiveness.”

“I can’t say, causally, that was because Bishop Tutu explained it to them for the first time in that moment,” Haugen told me. “But it was part of this change, and I think it decisively pulled out from underneath a very devout white population the theological underpinnings of their political system.”

This encounter had a profound impact on Haugen. It gave him a picture of what is possible in both human life and human history. “Most powerfully,” he said, “I got to witness with my own eyes what it looks like for a leader to be liberated from fear in the struggle for justice.”

“I saw enough of Tutu and other leaders to know they were regular human beings, but in the face of a regime willing to kill those who opposed it, these leaders had been moved by their faith to an existence where fear now had no ultimate power over them,” Haugen told me.

He also glimpsed the possibility of change. “I saw white church leaders abandon a powerful apartheid heresy that they had desperately held on to for decades because, in the end, they came to believe that God was not in it,” he said. “I saw that an oppressive religious movement driven by fear could be reversed by the terms of critique embedded within the Christian tradition itself and by the sacrificial witness of the faithful who were no longer afraid. And in the end, a vicious regime of brutal power was swept into the dustbin of history.” A dozen years after he left South Africa, Haugen founded the International Justice Mission, which bills itself as the largest international antislavery organization in the world.    

Haugen has long been drawn to grand moral struggles. As early as second grade, he fell in love with Abraham Lincoln. Haugen was, he told me, “fascinated by the history and the drama for the struggle of good against evil and the problem of slavery.” By fifth grade, he was gripped by the story of Martin Luther King Jr. At Harvard, Haugen took Robert Franklin’s course at the Divinity School on the church and the civil-rights movement. And his interest wasn’t merely historical. He also led a Harvard-Radcliffe Christian Fellowship committee studying whether the university should divest from companies doing business in South Africa, a move it partially made in 1986.

In 1984, Haugen’s junior year at Harvard, Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership of the nonviolent campaign to end the brutal apartheid regime. During his senior year, Haugen resolved to go to South Africa. “I was interested in exposing myself to the experience of church leaders in South Africa, who were attempting to address the apartheid crisis,” he said. “The church leaders in South Africa become leaders of that movement by default, because the political leaders were either in prison or in exile. And so the Black population in South Africa would default to its church leaders. And that’s how someone like Bishop Tutu came to prominence. He wasn’t seeking to lead that social movement.”

[From the January/February 2009 issue: The African in him]

In South Africa, he met Christian leaders who no longer were afraid of what others could do to them. “They acted as if the things that Jesus taught were actually true, and it seemed to give them a courage that was unconquerable in a certain way,” Haugen said. He learned that hope was possible even in places beset by seemingly intractable problems, “but it requires enormous courage.”

He returned to the United States and enrolled at the University of Chicago Law School, focusing on civil rights. He interned at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, which sent him to the Philippines in 1989 to investigate why the Cory Aquino government, which had come to power following the Marcos regime, was unable to control its security forces and army. And after graduating from law school, he joined the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, focusing on police-misconduct cases. That led to another life-altering overseas assignment.

After the Rwandan genocide—about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed within 100 days in 1994—the international community wanted to bring its leaders to justice. Haugen led the United Nations Special Investigations Unit in Rwanda. He was given a list of approximately 100 different mass graves and massacre sites. He and his team combed through mangled corpses and personal effects rotting in scores of massacre sites across Rwanda. Bodies were piled up in churches. Each day, as they painstakingly documented this horror, they saw what it looks like to be truly defenseless in the face of violence.

Haugen organized mobile units to find survivors of the massacres to get their testimony about what had happened. He took the testimony of a father whose young children had been hacked to death with machetes. Their findings would eventually be provided to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

He interviewed an 8-year-old girl who had survived one of the massacres. Her entire family had been killed; she’d lain among the dead for several days. It was a miracle she survived.

“She was just full of life and beauty—she was a beautiful little child,” he recalled. “And the thing that struck me about that was how easy it would be to lose the precious value of that single child because hundreds of thousands of them could be butchered. Yet the world would not respond and didn’t respond. Clearly it was because the value of those who were being slaughtered did not register with us. And yet the absolute value of the child that was sitting in front of me was so manifest.”

Haugen came away from that experience painfully aware of the devastating problem of violence in poor countries, and especially for the common person living in poverty. “Rwanda had been the recipient of lots of development and poverty-alleviation aid for decades,” he told me. “And you could see how it really doesn’t matter how much in terms of goods and services you provide to the poor. When the guys with machetes show up, the benefit of much of that is devastated.” he said. “I came back from that asking: Who’s addressing the problem of violence among the poor?” And failing to find a satisfactory answer, he decided to provide one.

Haugen started International Justice Mission in 1997 with only an administrator, an investigator, and two interns. The organization’s budget was less than $100,000. His first case was in the Philippines; a 12-year-old girl had been raped and impregnated the previous year, but the suspect had not been taken into custody. Through Haugen’s efforts—he worked with the Philippine National Police—the rape suspect was eventually arrested. Haugen then learned about forced labor in South Asia and expanded his focus there.

“It became clear that even though we could work a few of these cases, what we really should do is build Indigenous teams, local teams, to take these things up,” Haugen said. “And so that’s immediately what we started to do.” Haugen’s goal was not only to rescue thousands, but to protect millions by reforming the justice systems in poor nations throughout the world.

Over the 25 years of its existence, IJM has become a global leader in that effort. Its staff is now around 1,400, more than 90 percent of whom serve in the countries and communities where they are from, and it has 29 field offices in 17 countries. IJM’s budget now exceeds $120 million. The activity brought increased attention; in 2009, Samantha Power profiled his work in The New Yorker.  

IJM’s local and national teams are composed of lawyers, criminal investigators, trauma social workers, community organizers, and others who take on cases of violence against women and children, slavery, and police abuse of power. These teams not only work with local authorities to rescue victims and bring criminals to justice; they also provide survivors with aftercare services to help people overcome trauma and be restored to safety and stability.

IJM’s goal is also systemic change. The team collaborates with local justice systems and community leaders to respond effectively to violence. Together, they design improvements that serve survivors, deter criminals, and dramatically decrease violence. Haugen wants to turn the rule of law from an abstraction into a reality in the daily lives of poor people.

He points to three distinctive strengths to explain IJM’s success. The first is a focus on measurable results. “Every time governments in low- and middle-income countries have partnered with IJM … they’ve measurably decreased the targeted violence in that poor community by between 50 and 85 percent in between four to eight years, as measured by third-party evaluators,” he told me. The nine areas where these evaluations have been done cover more than 10 million people. “I don’t think there’s another organization in the world that has those kinds of measurable results for drastically reducing violence among the poor,” he said.    

The second is that IJM focuses on the experiences of the people it serves. “Everything at IJM has been built from the lived experience of survivors and local Indigenous leaders and staff,” Haugen told me. Since 1997, IJM has asked tens of thousands of survivors of gender violence, police abuse, and forced labor, “How do you experience the justice system?” They tend, he said, to list four priorities: They want freedom from violence; accountability for their abusers; restoration, so they can thrive; and an end to the violence, so other people are not harmed.

IJM’s third strength is its determination to convince other human-rights and development organizations that reducing violence is a prerequisite for effective development. Haugen points out that education for girls is perhaps the most powerful anti-poverty program we have, but that too often, it’s not safe for them to get to or be at school. So long as that’s the case, any effort to educate girls is going to fail.

“The question was, can you make a dysfunctional, poorly operating justice system in a poor community actually do what it’s supposed to do?” Haugen said. “And I believe IJM is the first agency to come along and actually prove that’s possible over a lot of different jurisdictions, over large populations, over and over again.”

“AN INSTITUTION IS THE LENGTHENED shadow of one man,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, and IJM is the lengthened shadow of Gary Haugen. It’s no surprise, then, that faith is an essential part of IJM’s work.

[From the April 1862 issue: American Civilization]

IJM’s staff members come from a variety of Christian traditions, though the organization’s services are never conditioned on religious profession, nor do IJM’s programs include religious proselytization. Its work is its witness.

I asked Haugen, whom I’ve known for decades, about the role that faith plays in IJM’s work. “In some ways it just begins with me very personally,” he told me. “Because when you’re the first employee of an organization and you’re building an organization to take on something really hard—and violence against the poor is a really hard problem—everybody needs inspiration and everybody needs support. I certainly found this in my faith.”

Fundamental to Haugen’s faith is the idea that God loves everyone and that everyone has dignity and worth. “That little girl who was in front of me, across the table in Rwanda, is of infinite worth and dignity, as much as my own girls at home, who were just coming into the world at that time,” he said.

In South Africa, he told me, he saw how church leaders were sustained by their faith in their struggle against apartheid. “They found support for each other in their faith. They prayed for each other. They cared for each other. They reminded each other that there was a God of justice, who was on the side of justice. So I think that was such a powerful experience for me.”

Haugen believes that part of building a community of inspiration and support means you have to set aside time to receive inspiration and support. And so almost all of IJM’s offices observe half an hour of silence at the beginning of the day.

“We give ourselves 30 minutes every day in solitude and silence to order the interior” life, he said. “Then we will get to work and get very busy. And most offices will get time to actually gather together to pray about things. That’s another way of supporting one another, asking for God’s help. But it’s that mutual inspiration and mutual support that we find in some of these rhythms.” These practices, he said, have enabled IJM’s staff “to do a difficult thing for a long time.”

“Other people will find inspiration someplace else, and others will find support somewhere else for the struggle for justice,” Haugen told me. “But IJM has grown as a community finding inspiration and, I think, support in a common faith.”

I ASKED HAUGEN about his own pilgrimage of faith. He told me his dad was an atheist progressive Democrat and his mom was a devout Baptist Republican. One of six children raised in Sacramento, California, Haugen attended church on Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night. “I can’t remember a time as a child not believing there was a God,” he said. “But by the time I’m an adolescent—in high school—I was trying to figure out if I really would make that faith my own.” He described his journey at that time as more cognitive than emotional, involving asking a lot of questions, seeing if there was “stable intellectual ground to stand on.”

Haugen headed to Harvard in 1981, believing that the Christian worldview has some great strengths, but also some challenges. “But the thing I also realized is, ‘Oh, every worldview has challenges.’ So this is not about a worldview that has no challenges versus my worldview that has lots of challenges. You just have to acknowledge everybody has a version of reality that they are living by, thinking that it’s real.” He told me that the Christian worldview provided, for him, the most intellectually rigorous accounting for reality. “I found it to also be the most helpful orientation for living life,” he said. “I just found the Christian faith served well.” At Harvard he encountered people of faith he respected who were asking what it means to be a Christian in a world of hurting and suffering. “That was very formative for me,” he said.

[From the April 2018 issue: The last temptation]

His study of the Bible and his experience with a community of faith helped shape his work. “There was something very profound about God because he was in all of the places of human suffering,” he said. “The story of Jesus is about coming and being in the midst of human suffering and being crucified himself. And so I definitely felt like I really wanted to know God deeply, but I would not know God deeply as long as I was somewhat removed from human suffering.” That commitment changed the trajectory of Haugen’s life. “What matters most is knowing the God who made you— and I don’t think you can know the God who made you unless you know something quite deeply about what God knows about, which is human suffering and hurt.”

But Haugen also talked with me about “the need to chase joy.” He told me that people who are passionate about justice can sometimes feel guilty for enjoying their life; they feel like they need to “wallow in the darkness and in the sorrow 24/7 because it seems to honor, in a way, and respect the depth of the tragedy and the sorrow in the injustice. And that’s an impulse that most compassionate justice advocates will feel. But the problem with that is that if you don’t come up for air, if you don’t actually, intentionally flee the depth of the sorrow and the darkness to go find inspiration and light and joy and encouragement, you will just burn out. And so we say [at IJM] that joy is the oxygen of doing hard things.”

Haugen used an analogy to make his point. “When you get on the airplane, they say, ‘Please secure your own oxygen mask before assisting others.’ And that’s just a great image.” Each person needs to figure out what refreshes them with joy, he said. “In the absence of that, I just don’t think you can sustainably take on a struggle for justice.”

In his 1984 Nobel Peace Prize lecture, Desmond Tutu asked, “When will we learn that human beings are of infinite value because they have been created in the image of God, and that it is a blasphemy to treat them as if they were less than this and to do so ultimately recoils on those who do this?”

That was the lesson Haugen learned in South Africa, and in the blasphemy he witnessed in Rwanda. He has it made his life’s work to help heal a broken world, to piece back together shattered lives, in the name of justice.

More than three years ago, the coronavirus pandemic officially became an emergency, and much of the world froze in place while politicians and public-health advisers tried to figure out what on Earth to do. Now the emergency is officially over—the World Health Organization declared so on Friday, and the Biden administration will do the same later this week.

Along the way, almost 7 million people died, according to the WHO, and looking back at the decisions made as COVID spread is, for the most part, a demoralizing exercise. It was already possible to see, in January 2020, that America didn’t have enough masks; in February, that misinformation would proliferate; in March, that nursing homes would become death traps, that inequality would widen, that children’s education, patients’ care, and women’s careers would suffer. What would go wrong has been all too clear from the beginning.

Not every lesson has to be a cautionary tale, however, and the end of the COVID-19 emergency may be, if nothing else, a chance to consider which pandemic policies, decisions, and ideas actually worked out for the best. Put another way: In the face of so much suffering, what went right?

To find out, we called up more than a dozen people who have spent the past several years in the thick of pandemic decision making, and asked: When the next pandemic comes, which concrete action would you repeat in exactly the same way?

What they told us is by no means a comprehensive playbook for handling a future public-health crisis. But they did lay out 23 specific tactics—and five big themes—that have kept the past few years from being even worse.

Good information makes everything else possible. Start immediate briefings for the public. At the beginning of March 2020, within days of New York City detecting its first case of COVID-19, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio began giving daily or near-daily coronavirus press briefings, many of which included health experts along with elected officials. These briefings gave the public a consistent, reliable narrative to follow during the earliest, most uncertain days of the pandemic, and put science at the forefront of the discourse, Jay Varma, a professor of population health at Cornell University and a former adviser to de Blasio, told us. Let everyone see the information you have. In Medway, Massachusetts, for instance, the public-school system set up a data dashboard and released daily testing results.  This allowed the entire affected community to see the impact of COVID in schools, Armand Pires, the superintendent of Medway Public Schools, told us. Be clear that some data streams are better than others. During the first year of the pandemic, COVID-hospitalization rates were more consistent and reliable than, say, case counts and testing data, which varied with testing shortages and holidays, Erin Kissane, the managing editor of the COVID Tracking Project, told us.The project, which grew out of The Atlantic’s reporting on testing data, tracked COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. CTP made a point of explaining where the data came from, what their flaws and shortcomings were, and why they were messy, instead of worrying about how people might react to this kind of information. Act quickly on the data. At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, testing made a difference, because the administration acted quickly after cases started rising faster than predicted when students returned in fall of 2020, Rebecca Lee Smith, a UIUC epidemiologist, told us. The university instituted a “stay at home” order, and cases went down—and remained down. Even after the order ended, students and staff continued to be tested every four days so that anyone with COVID could be identified and isolated quickly.   And use it to target the places that may need the most attention. In California, a social-vulnerability index helped pinpoint areas to focus vaccine campaigns on, Brad Pollock, UC Davis’s Rolkin Chair in Public-Health Sciences and the leader of Healthy Davis Together, told us. In this instance, that meant places with migrant farmworkers and unhoused people, but this kind of precision public health could also work for other populations. Engage with skeptics. Rather than ignore misinformation or pick a fight with the people promoting it, Nirav Shah, the former director of Maine’s CDC, decided to hear them out, going on a local call-in radio show with hosts known to be skeptical of vaccines. A pandemic requires thinking at scale. Do pooled testing as early as possible. Medway’s public-school district used this technique, which combines samples from multiple people into one tube and then tests them all at once, to help reopen elementary schools in early 2021, said Pires, the Medway superintendent. Pooled testing made it possible to test large groups of people relatively quickly and cheaply. Choose technology that scales up quickly. Pfizer chose to use mRNA-vaccine tech in part because traditional vaccines are scaled up in stainless-steel vats, Jim Cafone, Pfizer’s senior vice president for global supply chain, told us. If the goal is to vaccinate billions of patients, “there’s not enough stainless steel in the world to do what you need to do,” he said. By contrast, mRNA is manufactured using lipid nanoparticle pumps, many more of which can fit into much less physical space. Take advantage of existing resources. UC Davis repurposed genomic tools normally used for agriculture for COVID testing, and was able to perform 10,000 tests a day,  Pollock, the UC Davis professor, told us. Use the Defense Production Act. This Cold War–era law, which allows the U.S. to force companies to prioritize orders from the government, is widely used in the defense sector. During the pandemic, the federal government invoked the DPA to break logjams in vaccine manufacturing, Chad Bown, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who tracked the vaccine supply chain, told us. For example, suppliers of equipment used in pharmaceutical manufacturing were compelled to prioritize COVID-vaccine makers, and fill-and-finish facilities were compelled to bottle COVID vaccines first—ensuring that the vaccines the U.S. government had purchased would be delivered quickly.   Vaccines need to work for everyone. Recruit diverse populations for clinical trials. Late-stage studies on new drugs and vaccines have a long history of underrepresenting people from marginalized backgrounds, including people of color. That trend, as researchers have repeatedly pointed out, runs two risks: overlooking differences in effectiveness that might not appear until after a product has been administered en masse, and worsening the distrust built up after decades of medical racism and outright abuse. The COVID-vaccine trials didn’t do a perfect job of enrolling participants that fully represent the diversity of America, but they did better than many prior Phase 3 clinical trials despite having to rapidly enroll 30,000 to 40,000 adults, Grace Lee, the chair of CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, told us. That meant the trials were able to provide promising evidence that the shots were safe and effective across populations—and, potentially, convince wider swaths of the public that the shots worked for people like them. Try out multiple vaccines. No one can say for sure which vaccines might work or what problems each might run into. So drug companies tested several candidates at once in Phase I trials, Annaliesa Anderson, the chief scientific officer for vaccine research and development at Pfizer, told us; similarly, Operation Warp Speed placed big bets on six different options, Bown, the Peterson Institute fellow, pointed out. Be ready to vet vaccine safety—fast. The rarest COVID-vaccine side effects weren’t picked up in clinical trials. But the United States’ multipronged vaccine-safety surveillance program was sensitive and speedy enough that within months of the shots’ debut, researchers found a clotting issue linked to Johnson & Johnson, and a myocarditis risk associated with Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA shots. They were also able to confidently weigh those risks against the immunizations’ many benefits. With these data in hand, the CDC and its advisory groups were able to throw their weight behind the new vaccines without reservations, said Lee, the ACIP chair. Make the rollout simple. When Maine was determining eligibility for the first round of COVID-19 vaccines, the state prioritized health-care workers and then green-lit residents based solely on age—one of the most straightforward eligibility criteria in the country. Shah, the former head of Maine’s CDC, told us that he and other local officials credit the easy-to-follow system with Maine’s sky-high immunization rates, which have consistently ranked the state among the nation’s most vaccinated regions. Create vaccine pop-ups. For many older adults and people with limited mobility, getting vaccinated was largely a logistical challenge. Setting up temporary clinics where they lived—at senior centers or low-income housing, as in East Boston, for instance—helped ensure that transportation would not be an obstacle for them, said Josh Barocas, an infectious-diseases doctor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. Give out boosters while people still want them. When boosters were first broadly authorized and recommended in the fall of 2021, there was a mad rush to immunization lines. In Maine, Shah said, local officials discovered that pharmacies were so low on staff and supplies that they were canceling appointments or turning people away. In response, the state’s CDC set up a massive vaccination center in Augusta. Within days, they’d given out thousands of shots, including both boosters and the newly authorized pediatric shots. Also, spend money. Basic research spending matters. The COVID vaccines wouldn’t have been ready for the public nearly as quickly without a number of existing advances in immunology,  Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told us. Scientists had known for years that mRNA had immense potential as a delivery platform for vaccines, but before SARS-CoV-2 appeared, they hadn’t had quite the means or urgency to move the shots to market. And research into vaccines against other viruses, such as RSV and MERS, had already offered hints about the sorts of genetic modifications that might be needed to stabilize the coronavirus’s spike protein into a form that would marshal a strong, lasting immune response. Pour money into making vaccines before knowing they work. Manufacturing millions of doses of a vaccine candidate that might ultimately prove useless wouldn’t usually be a wise business decision. But Operation Warp Speed’s massive subsidies helped persuade manufacturers to begin making and stockpiling doses early on, Bown said. OWS also made additional investments to ensure that the U.S. had enough syringes and factories to bottle vaccines. So when the vaccines were given the green light, tens of millions of doses were almost immediately available. Invest in worker safety. The entertainment industry poured a massive amount of funds into getting COVID mitigations—testing, masking, ventilation, sick leave—off the ground so that it could resume work earlier than many other sectors. That showed what mitigation tools can accomplish if companies are willing to put funds toward them, Saskia Popescu, an infection-prevention expert in Arizona affiliated with George Mason University, told us. Lastly, consider the context. Rely on local relationships. To distribute vaccines to nursing homes, West Virginia initially eschewed the federal pharmacy program with CVS and Walgreens, Clay Marsh, West Virginia’s COVID czar, told us. Instead, the state partnered with local, family-run pharmacies that already provided these nursing homes with medication and flu vaccines. This approach might not have worked everywhere, but it worked for West Virginia. Don’t shy away from public-private partnerships. In Davis, California, a hotelier provided empty units for quarantine housing, Pollock said. In New York City, the robotics firm Opentrons helped NYU scale up testing capacity; the resulting partnership, called the Pandemic Response Lab, quickly slashed wait times for results, Varma, the former de Blasio adviser, said. Create spaces for vulnerable people to get help. People experiencing homelessness, individuals with substance-abuse disorders, and survivors of domestic violence require care tailored to their needs. In Boston, for example, a hospital recuperation unit built specifically for homeless people with COVID who were unable to self-isolate helped bring down hospitalizations in the community overall, Barocas said. Frame the pandemic response as a social movement. Involve not just public-health officials but also schools, religious groups, political leaders, and other sectors. For example, Matt Willis, the public-health officer for Marin County, California, told us, his county formed larger “community response teams” that agreed on and disseminated unified messages.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Today I invite emails debating any of the following subjects: war, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change, corporate power, or natural resources. Read on for more context.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

After the television host Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox News, he posted a video message to Twitter that quickly went viral. In it, he noted that, in his newfound “time off” he has observed that “most of the debates you see on television” are so stupid and irrelevant that, in five years, we won’t even remember we had them. “Trust me, as someone who's participated,” he added, which squares with my impression of his show––an assessment I feel comfortable making only because I have carefully documented its shoddy reasoning.

But then Carlson added: “The undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future, get virtually no discussion at all. War. Civil liberties. Emerging science. Demographic change. Corporate power. Natural resources. When was the last time you heard a legitimate debate about any of those issues? It’s been a long time. Debates like that are not permitted in American media.” I disagree, and not just because I intend to air your perspectives on those very subjects.

Last March, this newsletter invited debate about the war in Ukraine and ran your responses. On the whole, The Atlantic––and most of the mainstream media––has published a lot more total articles from people who are supportive of Western aid for Ukraine, as I am, than contrary perspectives. But as you can see, this newsletter has made it a point to highlight the smartest writing I could find from different perspectives. If you look, you can find additional examples of contrasting perspectives from across the U.S. media: in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, National Review, Vox, and beyond. There are all sorts of plausible critiques of the way the American news media has covered Ukraine. But “debate is not permitted” is demonstrably false.

On civil liberties, which I’ve championed on scores of occasions in The Atlantic, the notion that debate isn’t permitted is likewise preposterous. Few issues are debated more than the parameters of free speech, abortion rights, gun rights, transgender rights, pandemic rights and restrictions, and more. “Emerging science” is a bit vague, but surely debates about mRNA-vaccine mandates and artificial intelligence count. The Atlantic has repeatedly published entries in ongoing debates about demographic change. I understand corporate power to be a perennial topic of debate in journalistic organizations. As for natural resources, I’ve recently read about subjects including climate change, gas stoves, Colorado River water supply, oil drilling and pipelines, and plastics pollution.

Again, there are all sorts of critiques of the media that are plausible, on those subjects and others, but the particular critique that Carlson actually prepared and uttered is demonstrably false, so I find it strange that so many people reacted to it by treating Carlson as if he is a truth-teller. Lots of people in the American media work much harder at avoiding the utterance of falsehoods.

How to Mark May 1?

The law professor Ilya Somin commemorates it every year in a highly nontraditional fashion, arguing that we all ought to treat the traditional workers holiday as Victims of Communism Day.

Here’s his case:

Since 2007, I have advocated using this date as an international Victims of Communism Day. I outlined the rationale for this proposal (which was not my original idea) in my very first post on the subject: May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their [authority]. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes' millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so …

Our comparative neglect of communist crimes has serious costs. Victims of Communism Day can serve the dual purpose of appropriately commemorating the millions of victims, and diminishing the likelihood that such atrocities will recur. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day and other similar events promote awareness of the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and radical nationalism, so Victims of Communism Day can increase awareness of the dangers of left-wing forms of totalitarianism, and government domination of the economy and civil society.

Meanwhile, at the World Socialist Web Site, David North published the speech he gave to open the International May Day Online Rally. His remarks included provocative statements about the war in Ukraine:

The present war in Ukraine and the escalating conflict with China are the manifestations, though on a much more advanced and complex level, of the global contradictions analyzed by Lenin more than a century ago. Far from being the sudden and unexpected outcome of Putin’s “unprovoked” invasion—as if the expansion of NATO 800 miles eastward since 1991 did not constitute a provocation against Russia—the war in Ukraine is the continuation and escalation of 30 years of continuous war waged by the United States. The essential aim of the unending series of conflicts has been to offset the protracted economic decline of US imperialism and to secure its global hegemony through military conquest.

In 1934, Leon Trotsky wrote that while German imperialism sought to “organize Europe,” it was the ambition of US imperialism to “organize the world.” Using language that seemed intended to confirm Trotsky’s analysis, Joe Biden, then a candidate for the presidency, wrote in April 2020: “The Biden foreign policy will place the United States back at the head of the table … the world does not organize itself.” But the United States confronts a world that does not necessarily want to be organized by the United States. The role of the dollar as the world reserve currency, the financial underpinning of American geo-political supremacy, is being increasingly challenged. The growing role of China as an economic and military competitor is viewed by Washington as an existential threat to American dominance.

Imperialism is objectionable but to me that premise leads to a starkly different conclusion: that the imperial ambitions of Russia and China ought to be resisted and that insofar as NATO or the United States helps Ukraine or Taiwan, we are reducing the likelihood of imperial conquest, not engaging in it.

More to Come on Trans Issues

Another batch of responses from readers should be coming soon. (If you missed the first batch, they’re here.) In the meantime, here’s a question from the Up for Debate reader Paul, who writes:

I have come to understand and accept that the concept of “gender” is largely a social construct, is not synonymous with “sex,” and indeed is not dependent upon or related to sex in any objective way. This notion—that gender and sex are independent attributes—is, I think, one of the ideas that is fundamental to understanding and accepting transgender people. For many young people, this idea seems simple and self-evident. Yet, for anyone who has lived any length of time in a culture where, for centuries, these two words held virtually identical meanings, separating them can be a real struggle.

It is with that thought in mind—the acceptance of the fundamental difference between gender and sex—that I approach the issue of transgender people participating in competitive sport with the following sincere question: Are sports competitions divided by gender or are they divided by sex? If sports are divided by sex, then it follows logically that gender should have nothing to do with the discussion. That is, it follows that transgender people should only participate in sports along with those of their same birth sex. On the other hand, if sports participation is divided along gender lines, then everyone of the same gender (obviously, by definition this must include transgender people) should be invited to participate, regardless of sex. Is there more evidence that sports are arranged as a competition between those of the same sex, or those of the same gender?

Provocation of the Week

At Hold That Thought, Sarah Haider writes that for a long time, she assumed that “with no material incentives in one direction or another, people will think more freely. A world in which no one has to worry about where their paycheck will come will be a world in which people are more likely to be courageous, and tell the truth more openly. And of course, it is obvious how financial incentives can distort truth-telling. This is, of course, the justification for academic tenure.”

Now she wonders if tenure may actually pave the way for more conformity. She explains:

First and foremost, it is not the case that free people will necessarily speak truthfully. No matter the romantic notions we like to hold about ourselves, humans do not deeply desire to “speak the truth”. There are more beautiful things to say, things that make us feel good about ourselves and our respective tribes, things that grant us hope and moral strength and personal significance—truth, meanwhile, is insufferably inconvenient, occasionally ugly, and insensitive to our feelings. But lies, by their very nature, can be as beautiful and emotionally satisfying as our imaginations will allow them.

Unfortunately, some degree of fidelity to reality is often required to prosper, and so occasionally we must choose truth. But that degree is dependent on our environments: lies are a luxury which some can afford more than others. Material freedom isn’t just the freedom to tell the truth, it is the freedom to tell lies and get away with it. As I’ve noted before, the lack of economic pressures can clear the way for independent thinking, but they can also remove crucial “skin in the game” that might keep one tethered to reality.

I suspect that on the whole, tenure might simply make more room for social pressures to pull with fewer impediments. If keeping your job is no longer a concern, you will not be “concern-free”. Your mind will be more occupied instead by luxury concerns, like winning and maintaining the esteem of your peers. (And in fact, we do see this playing out at universities. Professors are more protected from the pressures of the outside world due to tenure, yet they are uniquely subservient to the politics within their local university environment.) …

Academics actively shape their own environments. They grant students their doctorates, they help hire other faculty, they elect their department chairs. When an idea becomes prominent in academia, the structure of the environment selects for more of the same … When you are forced to coexist with the enemy, you develop norms which allow both parties to function with as much freedom and fairness as possible. Ideologically mixed groups will, in other words, tend to emphasize objective process because they do not agree on ends. This environment is fairly conducive to the pursuit of truth.

More uniform groups, on the other hand, will tend to abandon process—rushing instead towards the end they are predisposed to believe is true and willing to use dubious means to get there. This creates a hostile environment for dissenting members, and over time, there will be less of them and more uniformity, which will inevitably lead to an even more hostile environment for dissent. When a majority ideology develops, it is likely only to increase in influence, and when it is sufficiently powerful, it can begin competing with reality itself.

I retain hope that tenure does more good than harm but encourage faculty members who enjoy it to exhibit more courage to dissent from any orthodoxies of thought they regard as questionable.

Cosmonauts threw a parcel of hardware into open space in a planned manoeuvre.

International lender raises 2023 growth outlook for region to 4.6 percent, up from 4.3 percent in October.