Election mailbag

Questions about the elections, and some thoughts on our Oct. 7 piece

I’m not going to get too deep into Slow Boring’s editorial choices here, but I did want to acknowledge that some members didn’t like the decision to run Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib’s reflections on a year of war in Gaza on Monday.

I know some of you feel that October 7 should be a day purely for commemorating the victims of the Hamas assault that set these events in motion. And I do get where that’s coming from. But we got a strong pitch from a Palestinian writer whose work I admire and who we’ve been wanting to work with for a while now. There’s a world in which we got a pitch from someone else and would have run something different, but there’s not a world in which we would’ve insisted that the day be reserved for a piece of pure memorialization — that’s simply not what this site is about. We do political and policy analysis, and we try to be highly differentiated, and I think the kind of humane and realistic pro-Palestinian advocacy that Ahmed does is sorely needed in the world. It’s, of course, not what everyone wants to hear at a difficult time, but that’s sort of the point.

One commenter that said “more Afghanis died in the Afghanistan War than on Sept 11. Still on Sept 11, we commemorate the people who lost their lives in the Twin Towers and in the planes, not the people who were hurt in the war fought with the government who was harboring the terrorists who committed that attack.”

That’s true enough, but I think it misses the point. We’re not really commemorating at all — we’re trying to do policy journalism. The policy question at hand really is about the future of Gaza, and I think to understand that you need to look primarily at what’s been happening in Gaza, both before and after 10/7. As some of you pointed out, we could’ve run the piece any other day of the year. But we believed it was best to run it on the day interest in the policy questions Ahmed discussed would be highest.

We appreciate the thoughtful comments and feedback we received, and we’re particularly grateful to those of you who were able to express your disagreements — with Ahmed and with each other — in an empathetic and productive manner.

On to some questions.

Patrick M Dennis, MD: JD Vance's repeated claim in the debate that Trump saved Obamacare reminded me that he did indeed eliminate the individual mandate. I had been primed for years to believe that without the individual mandate, health insurance would go into a “death spiral.” This was even an issue between Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008. Why have we not seen the death spiral??

The whole individual mandate thing has long been incredibly poorly understood, so I think it’s worth stepping back and reconsidering from first principles: