Today's Liberal News

Lora Kelley

A Bad Day for Biden

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Yesterday was rough for President Joe Biden. A blistering special-counsel report cleared him of the threat of charges in his classified-documents case, in part because prosecutors expected that he’d present to a jury as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.

The Long Odds of This Year’s Super Bowl Location

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
For years, the NFL balked at even a whiff of gambling—and kept Las Vegas at a distance as a result. But as the league has become more open to gambling, it has also embraced the city synonymous with it.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
Welcome back to the chaos of the Trump era.

How Seven Companies Took Over the Stock Market

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
The Magnificent Seven—a nickname for the highest-flying tech stocks—have lately been buoying the S&P 500. Fun cowboy name aside, the stocks’ outsize impact on the market is raising eyebrows.

Why the + Is Everywhere

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
The plus sign is everywhere in the world of branding. It’s cool (sort of), capacious, and wholly unoriginal. At least it’s difficult to mock.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Persistent Power in Silicon Valley

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Over the past few years, Mark Zuckerberg has been somewhat overshadowed by more antic-prone CEOs and flashier technology. But his appearance before the Senate yesterday is a reminder that he’s still very much a power broker of Silicon Valley.

TV Is Back in Its Commercials Era

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
One by one, most of the major streaming services have introduced ads to their subscription offerings. Now consumers face a choice: Pay up, or sit through commercial breaks like it’s 1999.

The Joy of Glory-Free Sports

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
For me, playing squash is not about achievement. That’s what makes it so much fun.

The Stakes of Economic Perception for Biden

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
A strong economy could work in Joe Biden’s favor in the coming election, but only if consumers’ attitudes stay positive too.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Elise Stefanik’s Trump audition
The Daily Show is better than this.
Americans can’t decide what it means to grow up.

The Biden Campaign’s New Abortion Messaging

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
With an eye toward taking on Donald Trump in a general election, President Joe Biden has started hammering home the message that he will protect reproductive freedoms in a second term.

The Perfect Antidote to Endless Reboots

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
In a world of reheated versions of popular IP, I love turning to new releases of older gems.

The Perfect Antidote to Endless Reboots

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
In a world of reheated versions of popular IP, I love turning to new releases of older gems.

What Long-Shot Candidates Know

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Several long-shot Republican candidates have quit the presidential race in recent weeks. Why did they hang on for this long—and why are they dropping out now?
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The Ozempic plateau
A slightly hotter world could still be a better one.

The Feeling of Losing Snow

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Snow is an essential part of how people in cold climates experience the winter, and a key source of water in many parts of the world. But new research shows that the snowpack—snow that stays on the ground in cold weather—is disappearing at an alarming rate as temperatures rise.

A Nightmarish Flight’s Aftermath

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.On Friday, a short flight teetered into near disaster when a chunk of the plane flew off during its ascent. Whatever the results of the pending investigation into what went wrong, the accident comes at a bad moment for Boeing.

A Damp Start to the New Year

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Moderation is usually a good idea. But must we commercialize the concept?First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The GOP completes its surrender.
Who’s afraid of calling Donald Trump an insurrectionist?
There was never such a thing as “open” AI.

A New Era for Mickey Mouse

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Mickey Mouse has long symbolized corporate efforts to control copyrighted material. As of January 1, an early version of the character is at last in the public domain.

A Very, Very Expensive Emoji

A court in Washington, D.C., has been stuck with a tough, maybe impossible question: What does 🌝 mean? Let me explain: In the summer of 2022, Ryan Cohen, a major investor in Bed Bath & Beyond, responded to a tweet about the beleaguered retailer with this side-eyed-moon emoji.

A Very, Very Expensive Emoji

A court in Washington, D.C., has been stuck with a tough, maybe impossible question: What does 🌝 mean? Let me explain: In the summer of 2022, Ryan Cohen, a major investor in Bed Bath & Beyond, responded to a tweet about the beleaguered retailer with this side-eyed-moon emoji.

What Gen Z Is Finding at the Library

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.In the smartphone era, libraries might seem less central. But it turns out that young people actually use them.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
How to be happy growing older
America should be more like Operation Warp Speed.
The Middle East conflict that the U.S.

The Uncanny Experience of Year-End Roundups

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Why are “year in review” roundups so pleasing to users?First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The real reason for marriage polarization
Harvard has a Veritas problem.
A sex scandal. A conservative power network. And Moms for Liberty.

America’s Spam-Call Scourge

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Any person with a phone knows that spam calls are a real problem in the United States. But fighting them is like playing whack-a-mole.First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
The English-muffin problem
George T.

Airlines Have an Accountability Problem

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Southwest Airlines was just ordered to pay a whopping fine for last year’s holiday breakdown. The penalty is a step toward accountability, but it tackles only a slice of the industry’s broader problems.

A Stubborn Workplace Holiday Tradition

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.So much can go wrong at an office holiday party. And yet … see you in the break room at 5:30.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Why Trump won’t win
Biden’s smart strategy for outmaneuvering Bibi
That’s not censorship.

‘Ozempic’ Shouldn’t Be a Catchall

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Ozempic broke out in a big way this year. By the time Jimmy Kimmel made a crack at the Oscars about the medication, bringing it a new surge of national attention, diabetes and obesity drugs that suppress appetite had been on the rise for months.

The Layoffs That Hammered the Tech Industry

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.This year was one of periodic bloodshed in tech, and the ongoing reverberations of early-pandemic hiring sprees are part of the problem.

The Dark Side of Christmas Music

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.The season of Christmas music––of Mariah Carey blasting in malls, carolers gracing street corners, and children singing about Rudolph—has once again arrived. Fans of festive cheer are rejoicing, and haters are rolling their eyes.

How Donald Trump Warped America’s Reality

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Donald Trump has hastened America’s decline into a “post-truth” society that privileges feelings over reality, my colleague Megan Garber has argued.

A Bizarrely Online Word of the Year

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.For the second consecutive time, the Oxford English Dictionary crowned an internet-slang term its word of the year. This year’s choice—rizz—is meaningful only to the extent that it reminds us of the dictionary’s role as a responsive, living object.

The Curtain Falls on George Santos

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.This morning, Republican Representative George Santos became the sixth House member in American history to be expelled from Congress. Though Santos managed to hang on to the support of the majority in his party, he was ousted in a 311–114 vote.

The Murky Shoplifting Narrative

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Despite inconclusive evidence, some retailers have seized on the narrative that theft is a major issue, pressuring lawmakers to crack down and changing the shopping experience as a result.