Today's Liberal News

Here’s what you can do to support Afghan refugees and help those experiencing the ongoing crisis

Since the withdrawal of American and NATO forces from Afghanistan in July, the Taliban has quickly taken control of large parts of Afghanistan. The government has fallen and the president has fled. While this is horrific for all Afghan people, women face the worst of it. Devastating videos and photos of people trying to flee the country are circulating on social media and other platforms.

This Could Be Heaven—Or This Could Be Hell

Rock and roll’s relationship with time—as in Father Time, not, you know, tempo—is fascinating. Men and women barely into their 20s, dewy young people without a mark on them, somehow contrive to write songs of shattering, been-there maturity. Whiskery wisdom ballads, epics of regret, failure binge blues, and howling prophetic voyages. Wide-eyed they sing them, these songs of experience. And then they grow old, and it all comes true.

The Books Briefing: Language Can Build Community—Or Sow Division

In the media reporter Brian Stelter’s book Hoax, he shares an anecdote that neatly sums up so much about Fox News and its influence on how its viewers communicate. A staffer who described a restaurant chain’s decision to offer a vegan burger as an improvement to the menu said they were castigated and corrected: The new option was actually proof of the “war on meat,” a network superior said. Thus, the story was quickly reframed in the channel’s familiar vernacular.

A Friendship That Fuels a Bigger Notion of Family

Each installment of “The Friendship Files” features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with two couples—Jenny and Marisa (parents to Atlas and Blaise), and Lora and Michelle (parents to Finnley and Tegan)—who had their children using the same sperm donor.

Climate Change Is Already Rejiggering Where Americans Live

When I met Flynn Hoob on Monday, he was standing in front of his home. Or rather, what was left of his home. It was the day after Hurricane Ida, and Hoob’s one-story house in Bourg, Louisiana, had fallen off its concrete pilings and sunk halfway into the nearby bayou. He had ridden out the storm inside until his house had tipped over, at which point he fled to the flooded-out bar next door and waited out the storm there for eight hours.

“On the Kill Floors”: Essential Workers in Meatpacking Plants Still Lack Safety & COVID Protections

Amid a surge in COVID-19 cases, we look at the experiences of meatpacking workers during the pandemic and beyond. Dulce Castañeda, a founding member of Children of Smithfield, a Nebraska-based grassroots advocacy group led by the children and family members of meatpacking workers, says conditions in the meatpacking plants during the pandemic remained as usual.

Dirty Work: Eyal Press on Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America

Ahead of Labor Day, we speak with journalist and sociologist Eyal Press about his new book, “Dirty Work: Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America.” Press profiles workers like prison guards and oil workers — people who make their livelihoods by doing “unethical activity that society depends on and tacitly condones but doesn’t want to hear too much” about, he says.

A Slow and Quiet Calamity

Rare is the New Orleans tourist who doesn’t visit the French Quarter, the 13-block neighborhood sitting at the edge of the Mississippi River. Residents, too, are accustomed to its sounds and smells and images, which together have come to represent our hometown, one of the most special places in the world. I think of the city I come from every day—especially now.