Today's Liberal News

Goodbye to All Those Tattered iPhone Cords

Some annoyances in life are unavoidable: the creak in your knees as you age, the tax code, Pete Davidson. Others are foisted on you by corporations hell-bent on leveraging their market power for financial gain. The iPhone cord is the latter.For more than a decade, Apple’s Lightning cable has been something like the avocado of consumer electronics: wildly expensive relative to its shelf life.

Kevin McCarthy Is a Hostage

As Kevin McCarthy made his televised declaration earlier today that House Republicans were launching an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, the House speaker stood outside his office in the Capitol, a trio of American flags arrayed behind to lend an air of dignity to such a grave announcement. But McCarthy looked and sounded like a hostage, and for good reason.That the Republican majority would eventually try to impeach Biden was never really in doubt.

The Only Way to Stop Trump

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.Eminent legal scholars think the Constitution makes Donald Trump ineligible for office; critics of the idea worry that using the Fourteenth Amendment will create an uncontrollable political weapon.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Explore The Atlantic’s guide to privacy.

Is Racial ‘Color-Blindness’ Possible?

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.Last week, I asked, “What roles should ‘color-blindness’ and race-consciousness play in personal interactions?”Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

Lauren Groff Has Written a New Gospel

At some point during the winter of 1609–10, in Jamestown, Virginia, the starving English settlers are said to have begun eating one another. Meanwhile, back in London, the King James Version of the Bible, arguably the greatest work of prose in the English language, was receiving its final edits; it went to the printer the following year.

“Capitalism Is an Insecurity Machine”: Astra Taylor on Student Debt & Our Radically Unequal World

As the COVID-19 era pause on federal student debt payments comes to an end and some 40 million Americans will resume payments next month, we speak with Debt Collective organizer Astra Taylor about Biden’s new Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, plan and her organization’s new tool that helps people apply to the Department of Education to cancel the borrower’s debt.

50 Years After Coup in Chile: Peter Kornbluh on How U.S. Continues to Hide Role of Nixon & Kissinger

On the 50th anniversary of the U.S.-backed military coup in Chile that deposed democratically elected socialist leader Salvador Allende, we discuss the U.S. contribution to the coup and declassified records obtained by the National Security Archive’s Chile Documentation Project with Peter Kornbluh. His book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, has been revised and published in Chile for the first time.

Mexico Decriminalizes Abortion in Major Step Forward for Reproductive Rights in Latin America

In a unanimous decision, Mexico’s Supreme Court issued a historic ruling Wednesday decriminalizing abortion on the federal level. While laws banning the procedure are still in place in a majority of Mexican states, people in those states can now receive abortions at federal medical facilities run the country’s public health system, and states will be barred from penalizing those patients and providers.