Today's Liberal News

Boiling the Ocean

Did you think it would all happen this fast? The heat domes, the thousand-year floods, the apocalyptic wildfires, that horrific orange sky? This summer’s convergence of extreme events makes it feel like we’re living in a CGI-laden disaster movie. But those epic blockbusters all offer the same material comfort: an ending. What we’re experiencing is different.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
It turns out that the debt matters after all.

Google’s New Search Tool Could Eat the Internet Alive

There’s no such thing as quickly finding a recipe online. Every cooking blog, it seems, is stuffed with paragraphs and paragraphs before you get to an actual recipe, text that might tell you about the history of the dish, or even which of the author’s kids likes it best. It’s not that food writers are categorically long-winded, though. They are just responding to Google’s demands.

How Handwriting Lost Its Personality

Because I am a writer, and because I am a hoarder, my apartment is littered with notebooks that contain a mixture of journal entries and school assignments. Many pages don’t have dates, but I can tell which era of my life they correspond to just by looking at the handwriting. In the earliest examples, from elementary school, my print is angular, jagged; even the s’s and j’s turn sharp corners.

Trump Confirms Another Liberal Conspiracy Theory

A recurring dynamic of the Trump era is that his opponents warn darkly about his secret motives or actions, and then he bluntly confirms their hunches in public.For years, Democrats insisted that Trump had secret, illicit ties to Russia. Then, in the summer of 2017, Donald Trump Jr. abruptly disclosed a 2016 meeting he’d held with Russians promising “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

The Everyday Genius of Shakespeare in Love

Earlier this year, Google introduced a chat application powered by artificial intelligence—an experimental competitor to ChatGPT and a tool that it hoped, per its marketing copy, would “be a home for your creativity, productivity and curiosity.” Understanding that some potential users might be less sanguine about a technology that blurs the line between the augmentation of human intelligence and the obsolescence of it, Google gave its new bot a canny name: Bard.

Meet the TV Meteorologist Who Quit After Facing Death Threats for Explaining Climate Crisis on Air

Chris Gloninger resigned from his position as chief meteorologist for KCCI-TV in Des Moines, Iowa, on Friday after receiving death threats as a direct result of reporting on climate change. One man behind the emails has pleaded guilty to harassment. We speak with Gloninger, now a senior climate scientist at the Woods Hole Group, about the difficulties scientists and journalists face when reporting on the climate crisis.

Texas Governor Outlaws Life-Saving Water Breaks for Workers as Climate Crisis Fuels Heat Waves

We take a closer look at the impact of the massive heat dome in Texas, where extreme heat is bearing down on some of the state’s most vulnerable populations, including workers and prisoners. At least three people have died after working in triple-digit heat, just as Republican Governor Greg Abbott signs into law a new measure that overrides mandatory water breaks for workers.

Human Rights Activists Warn Climate-Induced Heat Waves Are Killing Asylum Seekers at the Border

A massive heat dome is starting to engulf the southern United States this week. It could grow to be one of the worst in the region’s history, breaking records for intensity and longevity and impacting some 50 million people in Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Southern California and Nevada. Heat domes are a key part of heat waves and have become hotter and longer due to climate change, making heat the leading cause of weather-related death in the United States.

“Mission Creep”: Katrina vanden Heuvel on Ukraine’s Push to Join NATO & U.S. Plan to Send Cluster Bombs

At today’s NATO summit in Lithuania, member countries are expected to debate Ukraine’s request to join the military alliance, which would provide additional military support for its war with Russia. Opponents to Ukrainian membership, however, warn that such a move would needlessly escalate what Russia sees as a proxy war with the United States against NATO encroachment on its western border.

“A Historic Mistake”: Swedish Peace Activist Decries Move to Join NATO & Abandon Neutrality

Sweden may soon join NATO after over a year of negotiations with Turkey over its bid for accession to the transatlantic military alliance. Turkey’s right-wing President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had staunchly opposed Sweden’s bid due to the country’s strong presence of Kurdish exiles, including members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which Turkey considers a “terrorist” organization.