Today's Liberal News

Minority Report Tried to Warn Us About Technology

In Minority Report, when the detective John Anderton goes on the run in Washington, D.C., one of the first things he needs to do is swap out his eyes. The police of Steven Spielberg’s film, set in 2054, are not the only ones tracking people with eye-scanning machines mounted around the city. Public transit does so too, as does every business, and even all the billboards, which scream slogans such as “John Anderton! You could use a Guinness right about now!” as he walks by them.

Google’s ‘Sentient’ Chatbot Is Our Self-Deceiving Future

A Google engineer named Blake Lemoine became so enthralled by an AI chatbot that he may have sacrificed his job to defend it. “I know a person when I talk to it,” he told The Washington Post for a story published last weekend. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code.” After discovering that he’d gone public with his claims, Google put Lemoine on administrative leave.

Our Powerful, Shiny New Space Telescope Got Its First Upsetting Ding

Lee Feinberg was on vacation, and he deserved it. It was late May, and Feinberg, a manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, had spent “an incredibly tense several months” leading the effort to carefully deploy the mirrors on the world’s newest and most powerful space telescope, making sure that each of the gold-coated tiles—18 in all, arranged in a honeycomb shape—was properly aligned.

Pennsylvania GOP Election Official Tells Jan. 6 Comm. His Family Faced Death Threats Because of Trump

The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack heard live testimony Monday from Al Schmidt, the sole Republican on the Philadelphia County Board of Elections in Pennsylvania, a key battleground state in the 2020 election. He described how he found no evidence of voter fraud in 2020, and said he and his family received death threats after Trump lashed out at him on Twitter for not halting the vote count due to false claims of fraud.

“Detached from Reality”: Barr Says Trump Embraced Lies & Conspiracy Theories After His Election Loss

One of the key witnesses who testified live at Monday’s hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol was former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt, who led the the Fox News decision to become the first network to call Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in November 2020. Fox fired Stirewalt months later. Answering questions from Congressmember Zoe Lofgren, Stirewalt said Trump’s chance of winning was virtually zero.

A Drunk Rudy Giuliani Urged Trump to Declare Victory on Election Night, Trump Aides Testify

We spend the hour featuring highlights from the second public hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Main witnesses were ex-President Donald Trump’s former inner circle, including campaign manager Bill Stepien, Attorney General William Barr, campaign adviser Jason Miller and his own daughter Ivanka Trump, who all said Trump ignored them on election night in November 2020 when they argued against declaring victory.

Carnage & Chaos: “I Was Slipping in People’s Blood” on Jan. 6, Says Brain-Injured Capitol Officer

The second witness who testified live in the first primetime hearing of the House select January 6 committee was Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, who suffered a traumatic brain injury as she tried to hold the line outside the Capitol with fellow officers. She was with officer Brian Sicknick, who she said appeared to have been sprayed in the face and was extremely pale. Sicknick died the next day. Sicknick’s fiancee sat behind Edwards as she testified.

“From Protesters … to Insurrectionists”: Jan. 6 Witness Describes Proud Boys’ Violence at the Capitol

The white supremacist Proud Boys group and the far-right, anti-government Oath Keepers militia played an instrumental role in planning for a violent insurrection on the Capitol, according to the January 6 House committee, which aired new testimony from witnesses and the groups’ leaders in its first public hearing Thursday night. British filmmaker Nick Quested was embedded with the Proud Boys and shared his footage with the committee.

Conservative National Review editor to Jan. 6 committee: ‘Leave Ivanka alone!’

If you want to understand Donald Trump’s mindset in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, it’s crucial to get a clear picture of the information ecosystem he was part of at the time. It’s not like the insurrection spontaneously erupted out of a singularity in the void. As much as it may have looked spontaneous, it wasn’t simply a case of “then one day Trump besmirched his Underoos and up from the ground come a bumblin’ coup.

Bilingual ‘Show Me Your Friends’ campaign shows ties between Republican candidates and extremists

There’s a popular saying in Spanish that goes: dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres. In English, it translates to, show me your friends and I’ll show you who you are. It basically means that you can tell a lot about a person by the company they keep. 

That knowledge is essential when an entire political party has openly embraced white supremacist rhetoric and authoritarianism.

The Atlantic Daily: Can the Hearings Overcome American Indifference?

As we continue to learn more about the January 6, 2021, attack on our democracy, I explore whether any of it will matter to Republicans or disaffected Democrats. But first, here are three great new stories from The Atlantic.
Light and noise pollution are warping animals’ senses, Ed Yong warns in our July/August cover story.
A negative COVID test has never been so meaningless.
This is the most important study in the abortion debate.

How Bipartisan Gun-Control Talks Actually Succeeded

Time is the enemy of gun-control legislation, any advocate will tell you. The outcry for stricter gun laws has always been loudest during moments of national horror, in the hours and days after a massacre, when the anger is raw and the anguish of grieving survivors and families fills the airwaves. That brief window for action quickly begins to close when the public’s attention inevitably drifts to other topics. The opposition mobilizes, and talks break down or simply peter out.

10 Reader Views on Crime in Their Neighborhoods

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he 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.