Today's Liberal News

Remembering Peter Weiss: Legendary Human Rights Lawyer Dies at 99

The trailblazing human rights attorney Peter Weiss died November 3 at the age of 99. Weiss served on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights for nearly five decades, where he worked to end South African apartheid and the Vietnam War, fought for nuclear disarmament and sought justice for victims of the U.S.-backed Contras in 1980s Nicaragua. He pioneered using the 1789 Alien Tort Statute in human rights cases. He also represented the family of U.S.

“The Fight Is Not Over”: LGBTQ Advocates Challenge Supreme Court’s Anti-Trans Passport Ruling

In an unsigned order on Thursday, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to require U.S. passports to list travelers’ sex assigned at birth, another blow to the rights of transgender, nonbinary and intersex people, who had been able to select sex markers aligning with their gender identity or to use a gender-neutral X. Thursday’s order is an interim ruling while the passport case makes its way through lower courts.

The Limits of the Democrats’ Big Tent

The Democrats finally have their groove back—or at least a semblance of a groove.
For the first time since Donald Trump was elected a year ago, the Democratic Party’s general vibe is one of tentative celebration. And why shouldn’t it be? On Tuesday, candidates from very different ideological wings of the party sailed to comfortable victories in three states.

How Lawmakers Are Responding to the Shutdown

The government shutdown is now the longest in history. Panelists joined Washington Week With The Atlantic to discuss how voters and lawmakers are responding, and more.
Three weeks before Thanksgiving, “the administration has chosen to not find money to fund the food-assistance program for some 42 million Americans,” Jeff Zeleny, the chief national-affairs correspondent at CNN, said last night. “But they have found money for military payments and ICE officers and others.

The Dreams and Limits of the Suburbs

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Some critics of the suburbs argue that they’re not a place at all. “The anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term non-places to describe interchangeable, impersonal spaces lacking in history and culture that people pass through quickly and anonymously,” Julie Beck wrote last year.

When Scarcity Blurs the Line Between Right and Wrong

Whenever I read a novel about immigration, I recall a scene from the 2006 Italian film Nuovomondo (released as Golden Door in English). At the turn of the 20th century, a young Sicilian woman who will soon marry a “rich American” presents two postcards, supposedly from the United States, to a village elder. The first depicts a man holding a wheelbarrow that contains a massive onion, so large that it dwarfs both the wheelbarrow and the man.

All’s Fair Is an Atrocity

The beauty writer Jessica DeFino refers often to the “mirror world” inside our phone, the uncanny, glistening selfieverse that’s also become more real for many of its devotees than the lumpy, blotchy meatspace where the rest of us live. I thought about the mirror world while watching All’s Fair, Ryan Murphy’s new creative product—I can’t call it a television show, because it isn’t one.