Today's Liberal News

You Can See Inside Your Ear. That Doesn’t Mean You Should.

The ear is a marvelous, humble organ. It powers our hearing and also our balance, keeping us upright and connected to the world around us. In return, ear doctors tend to ask that we follow one very simple rule: Don’t put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear. Of course, you can’t actually fit your elbow inside your ear. But you can fit a Q-tip, which comes with this warning: “Do not insert swab into ear canal. Entering the ear canal could cause injury.

My Father, the Giant

Yesterday afternoon, my dad, Erik Dybkaer Andersen, lay sleeping at home in his hospice bed when a calm settled over his body and he drew his last breath. He was 78. For more than a year, we had known that cancer would take him; only the hour was uncertain. But it is still a shock to find him missing from his bedroom, from his family, from the world. It is too early to measure, much less put into writing, all that he meant to us.

“Voluntary Migration” or Ethnic Cleansing? Mouin Rabbani on Israel’s Push to Expel Residents of Gaza

Dutch Palestinian policy analyst Mouin Rabbani says Israel is using the Hamas attack of October 7 as a pretext to carry out its “long-standing ambition” to push Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip. He notes Israeli officials started proposing mass displacement of civilians to Egypt and other countries almost immediately after fighting began, and that this reflects Zionist policy since even before the founding of the state of Israel.

“This Is the Republican Party”: Khalil Gibran Muhammad Says Nikki Haley’s Slavery Flub Was No Accident

Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley is facing backlash after she failed to cite slavery as a cause of the Civil War during a town hall event in New Hampshire last week. She later clarified that “of course the Civil War was about slavery,” but her initial reluctance to say so is indicative of how Republican leaders have long avoided reckoning with the country’s past, says Harvard historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad.

“Free the Truth”: The Belmarsh Tribunal on Julian Assange & Defending Press Freedom

In a New Year’s Day special broadcast, we air highlights from the Belmarsh Tribunal held last month in Washington, D.C., where journalists, lawyers, activists and other expert witnesses made the case to free Julian Assange from prison in the United Kingdom. The WikiLeaks founder has been jailed at London’s Belmarsh prison since 2019, awaiting possible extradition to the United States on espionage charges for publishing documents that revealed U.S.

Claudine Gay’s Resignation Was Overdue

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.Claudine Gay engaged in academic misconduct. Everything else about her case is irrelevant, including the silly claims of her right-wing opponents.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
Hamas doesn’t want a cease-fire, Graeme Wood argues.

An Old-Fashioned Scandal Fells a New Harvard President

For all the focus on recent changes in the political mood on college campuses, the downfall of Harvard President Claudine Gay turns out to be a story about some of the oldest values of academia.Gay, a political scientist, resigned today, making her the second president of an Ivy League institution to bow out in the past month. University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill stepped down on December 9, but the cases are not as similar as they might initially seem.

When Did Humans First Start Wearing Clothes?

The naked human is a vulnerable creature. Lacking the fur of our mammalian ancestors and relatives, we have bare skin that offers little defense against the sun’s brutal rays or wind’s biting chill. So instead, we have had to invent a technology to replace our long-lost fur: “portable thermal protection,” as the archaeologist Ian Gilligan calls it or, more simply, clothing.Without clothing, humans would never have reached all seven continents.

Hamas Doesn’t Want a Cease-Fire

Recently, I drove along Israel’s northern border, west to east. To my American sensibility, it is the best road trip in Israel—a 90-minute version of a trip that would take many hours on California back roads—from the ocean through scrubby hills and finally to the Golan Heights.