Today's Liberal News

Now Do Amazon

One of the great literary hoaxes of our time is the book spine. A staggering number of logos stare out from dust jackets, celebrating names including Crown, Vintage, Ballantine, Knopf, and Dial. But the pluralism implied by this diversity of monikers is a sham. In the U.S., nearly 100 of them belong to a single company: Penguin Random House. The rest are owned by a small handful of competitors, one of which is Simon & Schuster.

“Working People Everywhere Have Had It”: SEIU Pres. Mary Kay Henry on Unions Mobilizing for Midterms

We look at the high stakes of the midterm elections for workers, including in key battleground states. Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, says they are campaigning to empower working people, especially infrequent voters of color and new immigrants, to vote in their best interests. “We have got to make our votes a demand, and not a show of support for candidates that are with us one day and against us the next,” says Henry.

How to End the War in Ukraine: Matt Duss and Ray McGovern Debate U.S. Policy on Russia, NATO & More

As the U.S. pours billions in military aid into Ukraine, we host a debate on the Biden administration’s response to the war and U.S. policy toward Russia amid increasing calls among progressives for a diplomatic end to the conflict. We speak to former Bernie Sanders foreign policy adviser Matt Duss, now a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who specialized in the Soviet Union.

Rep. Ro Khanna: U.S. Should Halt Arms to Saudis over Yemen War & Oil Production Cuts

Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna says Saudi Arabia should face consequences for its decision to cut oil output by 2 million barrels a day as part of the OPEC+ cartel, raising gas prices in the United States just before the midterm elections where cost-of-living issues are expected to be a major factor. He also discusses the Saudi-led war in Yemen, describing it as “one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world” that must be brought to an end.

Ukraine update: The tank isn’t dead, but the helicopter…

On Halloween, Russia lost three helicopters. Minimum. That included an Mi-8 transport helicopter shot down near Berestove, close to the Bakhmut front lines and a pair of Ka-52 attack helicopters that came too near Ukrainian positions in Kherson oblast. In addition, a widely-circulated video reportedly shows a Russian dissident sabotaging Russian helicopters at Veretye Air Base inside Russia on October 30. At that air base, three helicopters were reportedly lost on Monday.

‘No great risk of dying from pregnancy,’ says Ohio Republican who’s never heard of maternal death

People really need to stick to speaking about their expertise, and in some cases, not speak at all. Republicans across the country are speaking loudly and wrongly about reproductive health and, in at least one case, even body-shaming everyone who opposes the right wing’s ideas about bodily autonomy while doing so.

Ohio state Rep. Bill Dean doubled down on recent comments, calling rising U.S.

The Dark Heart of the Republican Party

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.January 6 was not an outlier. Laughing over a hammer attack on an old man, the GOP has completed its transition from a political party to a brutal mob.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

A Rapper Who Spoke Quietly and Had a Big Impact

One of the ironies of recent music history is that Migos, the band of Atlanta rappers who reshaped hip-hop in the mid-2010s, is known for something called the “triplet flow.” The term is musicological, describing the convulsive vocal cadence that took over pop thanks to them. But the term is also apt given that Migos were a trio related by blood.

Yasmin Tayag Joins The Atlantic as a Staff Writer, with Damon Beres Recently Hired as Senior Editor Focused on Technology

Yasmin Tayag will join The Atlantic’s editorial team this month, when she will become a staff writer. Over the past year, in her work as a freelancer, Yasmin has contributed extensively to The Atlantic, including a number of pandemic-related pieces where she reported on the effects of Americans’ low booster numbers, how we can’t quit hygiene theater, and whether we should be masking again.

Justice Jackson’s Crucial Argument About Affirmative Action

Yesterday, an hour and a half into the marathon hearings about whether colleges can use race as a factor in admissions decisions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson began to rub her temples as she looked down at her notes.“We’re entertaining a rule where some people can say what they want about who they are and have that valued in a system,” she said. “And I’m worried that that creates an inequity in the system with respect to being able to express our identity.

We’re Giving Up on the (Frog) Pandemic

It was December of 1996 when Karen Lips turned up the first bodies—and finally felt an ember of hope. As a graduate student working in the muggy forests of Central America, she’d noticed that an as-yet-unnamed culprit had been stripping the area of its frogs. Regions that had once rung with a chorus of croaks were silent and still, but no one had found the carcasses that could speak to a cause.