Today's Liberal News

The Economist Who Knows the Miracle Is Over

Brad DeLong felt confident that the story started in 1870.The polymath economist was writing a book on economic modernity—about how humans transitioned from eking out an existence on our small planet to building a kind of utopia on it—and he saw an inflection point centuries after the emergence of capitalism and decades after the advent of manufacturing at scale. “The Industrial Revolution is good.

“No Tech for Apartheid”: Google Workers Push for Cancellation of Secretive $1.2B Project with Israel

A national day of action is planned next Thursday as protests grow against Google’s secretive $1.2 billion program known as Project Nimbus, which will provide advanced artificial intelligence tools to the Israeli government and military. We speak with two of the leaders of the protest: Ariel Koren, a former Google employee who says she was pushed out for her activism, as well as Gabriel Schubiner, who currently works at Google and is an Alphabet Workers Union organizer.

“Zombie Ice”: Greenland’s Melting Glacier to Raise Sea Levels Nearly 1 Foot, Double Previous Estimate

We speak with glaciologist David Bahr, who co-authored a shocking new study this week revealing Greenland’s melting ice sheet will likely contribute almost a foot to global sea level rise by the end of the century. The report, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, finds that even if the world were to halt all greenhouse gas emissions today, 120 trillion tons of Greenland’s “zombie ice” are doomed to melt.

Ukraine update: Some parts of Kherson counteroffensive are coming into focus

On Monday, Ukraine began a counteroffensive in Kherson oblast. Depending on who you listen to, that effort has been wildly effective, liberating towns and villages from one end of the oblast to the other, or it’s been an utter failure, crushed by Russian troops who now control more territory than they did when Ukraine’s movement began. The truth is almost certainly in the middle.

Such an abuse’: Bill Barr delivers obvious facts to Fox News about Mar-a-Lago stash of documents

By now, you’ve probably heard that the disgraced former president, Donald Trump, seems to be something of a criminal. No, I’m not talking about his racist landlord violations from the 1970s. No, not his dubious interactions with contractors throughout the 1980s and 1990s. No, not his shady personal bankruptcies of the 1990s and 2000s. No, not even his two impeachments and the fact that there are numerous campaign violations that many believe need more criminal investigations.

The Speech No President Should Have to Give

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.We’re all parsing The Speech, Joe Biden’s “Soul of the Nation” address about the growing anti-constitutionalism of Republican extremism. But we should first consider how hard it is to evaluate a speech that no president should have to give.

Biden Gambles That ‘We the People’ Still Exist

The principles of classical liberalism that underlie the American political system emerged in an era, the late 17th century, when people were exhausted by violent religious wars. The philosophy that eventually created our democracy was therefore designed to “lower the temperature of politics,” as Francis Fukuyama has recently written, to take issues of existential truth off the table so that people could live in safety.

The Boundaries a Romance Novel Can Break

In Corinne Hoex’s Gentlemen Callers, sex is a dream. The book’s protagonist floats between abstract, ethereal trysts. When she visits a gas-station attendant in her sleep, she is a soapy sponge in his hands. Caressed by a pet groomer, she purrs; she’s his cat. Her liaisons are absurd and illicit—yet, crucially, never dangerous. Gentlemen Callers is not a classic romance novel or a straightforward bodice ripper, Zoë Hu points out.

The Books That Help Me Raise Children in a Broken World

In the introduction to her book Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change, Angela Garbes describes these times as “strange and difficult years of instability, loss, and grief—both general and intimate.” That’s it, I thought. Sometimes it feels as though decades of tragedy and erasure have been smashed into the past 30 months.

What Babies Hear When You Sing to Them

Randy Lubin recalls the exact moment his life became an improvised musical. The 35-year-old game designer from San Francisco never used to sing, not even in the shower or alone in the car. At his wife’s request, he would perform the kiddush, a Jewish prayer sung each week during Shabbat, but that was it. “Singing wasn’t something I sought out or particularly found a lot of joy in,” Lubin told me.Seeing his son, Curio, for the first time changed everything.

Historian of Radical Right: Biden Is Correct, Trump Poses Existential Threat to Future of Democracy

In a primetime address Thursday, President Biden warned Donald Trump and his radical supporters are threatening the foundations of the republic. Biden said, “Too much of what’s happening in our country today is not normal,” and that MAGA Republicans present a “clear and present danger to our democracy,” referring to Trump’s campaign slogan of “Make America Great Again.