Today's Liberal News

The Close, Prolonged Contact Myth

A man goes to a birthday party, sits next to someone with hantavirus, catches it, gives it to his wife, and dies. His wife then infects 10 more people at his wake. Another guest at that same birthday party has no interaction with the index patient except to say “hello” as they cross paths, but that person gets sick too.
One index patient, 33 subsequent infections, 11 deaths, four waves of transmission.

Big Brother Is ReTruthing You

The model of an authoritarian leader that the 20th century instilled in the Western imagination is a master of lies. Big Brother commands a machinery of propaganda that bombards his subjects with relentless projections of strength, combined with savaging of enemies real or imagined.

A Profound Mismatch in Modern Medicine

“You’re the eighth rheumatologist that I’ve seen,” the patient told me. She ticked off her symptoms—pain, fatigue, and what she described as a sense of brain fog—which she’d lived with for years. Some doctors had no answers for her; others had said that she likely had fibromyalgia, a poorly understood pain-processing condition, and that they could do little to help. She began to cry, and I began to sweat.

How AI Killed a 133-Year-Old Princeton Tradition

In 1876, an editorial in Princeton’s newly founded campus newspaper, The Princetonian, argued against the use of proctors to monitor exams. Proctoring was “a means of bad moral education,” the author wrote. Treat students as presumptively dishonest, and some would become so; treat them as honorable, and they would learn to behave honorably.

A Return to Jim Crow? Ex-DOJ Civil Rights Chief Kristen Clarke Denounces Gutting of Voting Rights Act

We speak with Kristen Clarke, general counsel of the NAACP, about growing threats to democracy in the United States following the Supreme Court’s gutting of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Republican lawmakers across the South are responding to the ruling by racing to redraw their congressional maps, which is expected to lead to a historic drop in the number of Black representatives in Congress.
“The Supreme Court’s devastating decision in the Louisiana v.

“Absolutely Vulnerable”: Over 20,000 Global South Ship Workers Stranded at Sea Due to Iran War

As Iran and the United States maintain rival blockades on the Strait of Hormuz and surrounding waters, we look at the more than 20,000 seafarers stranded on commercial ships since the outbreak of the war and unable to move out of the region. These maritime workers are often working-class men from developing countries across the Global South who form the crews on about 1,500 oil tankers, cargo ships and other vessels currently stuck on the water.

Trump Isn’t Setting Vance or Rubio Up for the Future

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Donald Trump loves to pit his advisers and staffers against one another—many aspects of Trump’s persona on The Apprentice may have been manufactured, but not this one.

Putin’s War Comes Home to Moscow

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Four years ago, President Vladimir Putin offered Moscow and its business elite a de facto deal: Support my war in Ukraine, and in exchange you won’t have to think about it. In the past week, that deal was broken.

Send the Frigates

America’s allies, particularly but not exclusively the Europeans, have very good reasons to be furious with the Trump administration. Quite apart from Donald Trump’s gratuitous insults and shocking threats (particularly to take Greenland), they are rightly incensed that the United States, together with Israel, launched the latest campaign against Iran without consultation or forewarning.