Today's Liberal News

The Unexpected Tenderness of Succession

This story contains spoilers through the second episode of Succession Season 4.The Roys of Succession tend to go out of their way to prove they’re not delicate people. They reject any opportunity to talk about their feelings. They’d rather drop f-bombs than share hugs and kisses. And they relish their daily boardroom showdowns: Reneging on deals, jousting in bidding wars, and tearing apart competitors is, for them, a way of life.

Road Rage Is Relevant Again. SNL Just Proved It.

Here’s one more piece of evidence that the ’90s have returned: Road rage is back in style. Stories of people who turned traffic frustrations into acts of violence were mainstays of that decade, rendered in news and in pop culture. A little bit true crime, a little bit morality tale, they captured the moment’s creeping suspicion that life was much less stable than it might have seemed.

‘Well, Is There Blood on the Street?’

For decades, a myth about civil-rights lawyers has been spread by court decisions, legislative testimony, and popular culture. Courthouses, the story goes, are filled to the brim with plaintiffs’ attorneys desperate to make a dollar off someone else’s misery; ambulance chasers all too happy to file frivolous civil-rights cases and squeeze a few bucks out of a cash-strapped city that would otherwise spend the money on its community center or library.In fact, the opposite is true.

The Light in Autumn

Someone was weeping,
wailing really; it was hard
to know who because we wore masks
in those days—perhaps we do still.
The light outside was, as they say,
autumnal, as lavish and unforgiving
as god. The wailerdidn’t stop, and eventually,
because no one gets in or out
of Kroger fast, we tracked him,
a bagger, bawlinglike a child, some of us
asking each other if he was
okay, knowing and hearing,
of course, he wasn’t.

The Hogwarts Legacy Boycott That Wasn’t

When Hogwarts Legacy was released in February, the verdict from video-game sites was close to unanimous: The latest spin-off from the Harry Potter series was a heartless mess, the product of a bigoted worldview, and playing it involved an uncomfortable act of moral compromise—or at least holding your nose and reassuring yourself that J. K. Rowling was not directly involved.The tech magazine Wired gave the game 1/10, and said its “real-world harms are impossible to ignore.

Meet the Nashville ER Doctor Who Joined 1,000+ Protesters at Tennessee Capitol Demanding Gun Control

More than a thousand students rallied at the Tennessee state Capitol Thursday to demand gun control, just days after a mass shooting at a Nashville Christian elementary school where three adults and three 9-year-olds were killed. Republicans hold a supermajority in Tennessee’s Legislature and have loosened gun restrictions. We speak with Dr. Katrina Green, an emergency physician in Nashville who has lost patients to gun violence and joined in Thursday’s protest.

“The Tale” Filmmaker Jennifer Fox on Surviving Childhood Sexual Abuse & Finally Naming Her Abuser

We speak with writer and filmmaker Jennifer Fox, whose 2018 movie The Tale dealt with childhood sexual abuse. She has now come forward to name her abuser. The film is a narrative memoir based in part on Fox’s own life experience about being abused by a coach as a young girl. While the main character is named Fox, the name of the abusive coach was fictionalized. Now Fox has revealed the man who abused her as Ted Nash, the legendary Olympic rower and coach who died in 2021.

The Power of Low-Stakes Humor

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.The internet was not exactly built to accommodate April Fools’ Day. As my colleague Megan Garber put it in 2015, our digital platforms don’t tend “to distinguish between stories and facts, between the earnest and the satirical.

Yachts Won’t Slow Down to Save a Nearly Extinct Whale

This article was originally published by Undark.Along the eastern coast of North America, North Atlantic right whales and boats navigate the same waters, which can get dicey for both. Fully grown, the whales can top out at more than 50 feet and weigh 140,000 pounds. A midsize, 58-foot-long pleasure yacht weighs about 80,000 pounds and can cost more than $1 million. “No mariner wants to collide with a whale,” says the retired Coast Guard officer Greg Reilly.

The Twitter I Love Doesn’t Exist Anymore

This is a sentimental story about Twitter, a little Twitterbilly elegy. I spilled tears, heavy Patsy Cline tears, for the platform for the first time a few weeks ago, during a walk with Amanda Guinzburg, a writer and photographer I’d long followed on Twitter for her excellent tweets about American politics and photos of libidinous flowers.