Today's Liberal News

Even TV Is Struggling to Connect

A few unspoken subjects hang over the third season of Netflix’s Master of None, as inescapable as air. One is the sidelining of Aziz Ansari’s character, Dev, for reasons that I can only assume relate to Ansari’s desire to be less conspicuous in recent years. Another is the fact that the series, set in New York City and the vague hinterland of “upstate,” was filmed in the U.K., a feint that provoked a sense of inauthenticity I couldn’t shake.

How Colleges Tell Student-Parents They Don’t Belong

H. Armstrong Roberts / ClassicStock / Getty
Over the past five years, Yoslin Amaya would return home most days in the early-morning hours from her night shift as a janitor to her in-laws’ house in Rockville, Maryland, where she lived in a bedroom with her husband and two sons, Andrew and James. Though she was often exhausted, her long days were not over.

Can Electric Fish Talk Like Obama?

In many, many ways, fish of the species Brienomyrus brachyistius do not speak at all like Barack Obama. For starters, they communicate not through a spoken language but through electrical pulses booped out by specialized organs found near the tail. Their vocabulary is also quite unpresidentially poor, with each individual capable of producing just one electric wave—a unique but monotonous signal.

The West Is Failing Belarus

When the Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko plucked a dissident journalist out of the sky, he proved two things: that his 27-year grip on power is unhindered by international isolation, and that, absent meaningful action by the United States and Europe—whose citizens were among the passengers on the hijacked flight—nothing is going to change.That, at least, is how Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya sees it.

Marcus Smith “Died Like an Animal” When Cops Hogtied Him. Police Have Known for Decades It Can Kill

Despite decades of warnings against the practice, police departments across the country continue to hogtie people during arrests, sometimes with fatal results. On September 8, 2018, Marcus Smith, a 38-year-old homeless Black man in Greensboro, North Carolina, was facing a mental health crisis and asked police officers for help. Instead, eight white officers brutally and fatally hogtied him.

George Floyd Week of Action Marks Anniversary of His Murder as Police Reform Bill Stalls in Congress

As the world marks the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, attorney Lee Merritt says there is still a long way to go in reforming “the deadliest police culture in the modern world.” Merritt, who has represented the Floyd family and other victims of police brutality, says Republicans and Democrats should come together to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.

Robert Kennedy Jr. cavorts with Nazis, and suing Daily Kos won’t make that any less true

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is pretty much the worst. The prominent anti-vaxxer (see here, here, and here, and also here and here as his family runs away from him), anti-masker, and anti-sound health policy scion of the famous family has done incredible damage to our ability to weather and emerge from this global pandemic, making common cause with Republicans like Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin to spread their anti-science, pro-COVID-19 message.