Today's Liberal News

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.

What Is Anyone Really Doing at COP?

The size of COP28 is hard to comprehend, even from the ground. More than 97,000 people have registered, according to the massive spreadsheet of expected participants, enough to populate a small city. The campus and its temporary denizens feel like a city too. Meetings are spread out across nearly 100 buildings, all with the freshly built feeling one expects from Dubai.

The 2024 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet

No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.But that hasn’t prevented a crowded primary. On the GOP side, more than a dozen candidates are ostensibly vying for the nomination.

War in the Congo Has Kept the Planet Cooler

The Belgian empire invaded the Congo rainforest during the late 19th century and swiftly established itself as the cruelest imperial force in Africa. The Congo is the world’s second-largest rainforest behind the Amazon, and King Leopold II treated it like a personal loot box. To strip away and sell its resources, he enslaved the Indigenous population, destroying much of the region’s preexisting culture and politics from the family unit on upward.

Planet for Sale? Record 2,500 Fossil Fuel Lobbyists Descend on COP28 U.N. Climate Summit in Dubai

This year, there are at least 2,456 lobbyists at COP28, the U.N. climate summit in Dubai — nearly four times as many as last year — from companies like Shell, Total and ExxonMobil. The lobbyists outnumber the delegations of every country other than Brazil and the United Arab Emirates, which is hosting the summit, presided over by the CEO of the UAE’s national oil company, Sultan Al Jaber.

What Trump’s Second Term Could Look Like

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 January/February issue of The Atlantic, 24 writers explain how Donald Trump could destroy America’s civic and democratic institutions, including its courts, national political culture, and military, if he succeeds in returning to the Oval Office.

The Atlantic launches the fifth season of its How To podcast with How to Keep Time, hosted by Becca Rashid and Ian Bogost

The Atlantic is today launching the fifth season of its popular How To podcast series with How to Keep Time, an exploration of our relationship with time and how to reclaim it. For the new season, The Atlantic’s Becca Rashid returns as co-host (and producer), now joined by Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost. How to Keep Time follows the show’s past seasons, which have explored such related topics as how to build a happy life (with Arthur C.

A Spiritual Manifesto for the Dispossessed

It starts where it finishes, in a dead-end drone: a single accordion note that seems to refine itself, thin itself out, even as it goes nowhere and lasts forever. That the song was recorded in 1985 is a mere accident of history: It could have been written at any point in the past 200 years. It could have been written by nobody at all—by Anonymous or by some mystery of collective authorship.

Israel’s Impossible Dilemma

To no one’s surprise, Israel and Hamas have resumed fighting in Gaza after almost a week of temporary truces and prisoner exchanges. Despite American and other entreaties to limit civilian casualties, Israel appears determined to push into the south of Gaza, but its strategic thinking seems to end there, and to hold no plausible endgame in sight.

Climate Summit Host UAE Blasted by HRW for Migrant Worker Abuse, Toxic Pollution & Mass Surveillance

The U.N. climate summit underway in Dubai marks the first time in nine years that representatives from Human Rights Watch have been allowed access to the United Arab Emirates. We speak with researcher Joey Shea about toxic pollution from UAE fossil fuels processing, and the state of political rights in the authoritarian country — especially for migrant workers who constitute 88% of the population but lack many labor protections under the kafala system.

COP28: Asad Rehman on Funding a “Just Transition” Off Fossil Fuels & Limits on Protest in UAE

As Democracy Now! broadcasts from the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, we get an update on negotiations and more from Asad Rehman, executive director of War on Want and lead spokesperson for the Climate Justice Coalition. He says developing countries must be compensated by rich countries for the impacts of the climate crisis and to allow for a “just transition” away from fossil fuels around the world, not just in the Global North.

“We Are All Palestinians”: COP28 Activists Demand Ceasefire in Gaza, Defying Protest Restrictions

Despite strict limits on protest in the United Arab Emirates, as well as United Nations rules at the climate conference known as COP28 now underway in Dubai, over 100 people demonstrated on the sidelines of the summit Sunday in solidarity with Palestine to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. Some held banners with watermelons painted on them, a known symbol of the Palestinian movement, to circumvent a ban on Palestinian flags.

“No One Is Safe in Gaza”: Journalist Akram al-Satarri Reports from Khan Younis Amid Israeli Assault

We speak with Palestinian journalist Akram al-Satarri in Khan Younis, the southern Gaza city that is now the focus of Israel’s assault. Israel has ordered many Palestinians to leave their homes and head further south toward Rafah near the Egyptian border, which Israel also attacked over the weekend. “They are being bombarded while they are trying to move,” says al-Satarri.