Today's Liberal News

The Job Market Is Thawing

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.
May was a good month for the American labor market. So was April, and so was March. The economy is once again adding tens of thousands of new jobs across a range of industries—just don’t call it a boom.

The Black Soldiers Who Changed the Meaning of the Civil War

In January 1865, not long after his march had reached the sea, General William Tecumseh Sherman held a remarkable meeting in Savannah, Georgia. Along with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Sherman spoke with a group of 20 Black ministers about slavery, the Civil War, and the world that was to rise from the ashes of both.

The Left-Wing Case Against Anti-Zionism

In September 1948, a prosperous Jewish businessman in Iraq was publicly hanged in front of a cheering crowd of 12,000. The following day, close-up images of Shafiq Ades’s broken body ran on the front page of Iraqi newspapers in a triumphant and gruesome spectacle that celebrated the punishment of a “Zionist traitor.” Iraq was losing the war that would create the state of Israel, a humiliation that challenged fantasies of Arab unity and conquest.

If Only Trump Knew What Vance Is Doing

Yesterday, Donald Trump admitted that he was being crafty when he elevated J. D. Vance to sell the resolution of the war with Iran. “If it works out, I’m going to take the credit,” Trump said of the peace deal. “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming J.D.”
Trump was smirking when he said this, but it was not a joke. Judging by the messaging emanating from across the Republican Party, letting the president claim victory while making the vice president own an obvious defeat is the GOP strategy.

America Is Headed Toward the Infinite Workweek

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
Last year, Steve Yegge started “suddenly getting pounded by nap attacks in the middle of the day.” Without fail, Yegge—a programmer and tech blogger—would “hit a wall, fall over, and sleep for 90 minutes,” he told me. Like many developers, Yegge no longer writes code by hand; instead, he manages a legion of bots to do that for him. His productivity has skyrocketed, but so too has his exhaustion.

DOJ Takes Elon Musk’s Side in NAACP Lawsuit Against xAI for Polluting Black Neighborhoods

The Department of Justice has intervened in a legal case involving the world’s first trillionaire, Elon Musk, asking a Mississippi federal court to toss a lawsuit from the NAACP against Musk’s company xAI, a subsidiary of SpaceX. The NAACP says xAI is violating the Clean Air Act by running dozens of unpermitted gas-burning turbines in majority-Black neighborhoods to fuel its data centers in Memphis, Tennessee.