Today's Liberal News

Crypto Money Still Matters for the Midterms

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.
The crypto industry has always moved in cycles: booms and busts; bull markets and harsh, unforgiving “winters.” We’re in something of a lull right now: Bitcoin, the original cryptocurrency, is worth about two-thirds of what it was last fall.

There’s No Such Thing as an AI ‘Lab’

When did AI companies become AI labs? That term, and the image of studious, exacting white-coated scientists that it conjures, has become curiously entrenched as a descriptor for the businesses swiftly escorting the world into an existentially unsettling future. AI companies themselves have embraced the label: When Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, addressed the pope earlier this year, he repeatedly referred to his company, one of the most powerful AI enterprises in the world, as a lab.

What Tech Titans Don’t Understand About Sci-Fi

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
When I read Thomas More’s Utopia in college, the main thing I retained was that the inhabitants of More’s imaginary island worked just six hours a day and earned what we might now call a universal basic income.

The Meaning of the Lindsay Clancy Mistrial

During the five weeks of her murder trial, Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts mother accused of murdering her three young children in 2023, spoke barely a word. She has been on display for the entirety of her livestreamed trial, sitting in her wheelchair beside her lawyer at the defense table.

OpenAI Wants to Talk About The Federalist Papers

Late last month, OpenAI launched a rather grand mission: nothing less than defending individual political freedom in an age of all-powerful machines. The company’s “Strategic Futures” team has styled itself, in a sense, as inheriting the task of America’s Founding Fathers: “We labor in service of the ideals of free expression and individual liberty that are enshrined in the humble parchment of the U.S. Constitution,” Dean Ball, the team’s leader, wrote in a new OpenAI blog post.

“Top of the World”: Remembering the Restaurant Workers Killed Atop World Trade Center in 9/11 Attack

A new documentary titled Top of the World tells the story of Windows on the World, the legendary restaurant atop the World Trade Center, through the eyes of its former employees. Windows on the World served guests for 25 years, until the morning of September 11, 2001, when it was destroyed in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Seventy-nine workers and 91 diners were killed.

“Terrorizing Our City”: ICE Targets Immigrants in Danbury, CT, Including at School Bus Stops

We go to Danbury, Connecticut, where residents held a mass demonstration this week to protest recent immigration arrests and to support the city’s immigrant community. Danbury, like many other communities across the United States, has been the target of a spike in immigration enforcement under the Trump administration, including local reports of ICE arresting parents at school bus stops.

“They Got Zero Notice”: 2,500 Workers Laid Off as Tyson Foods Shutters Meatpacking Plant in Illinois

Tyson Foods, the United States’ largest meatpacking and processing company, shuttered a beef processing facility in Joslin, Illinois, last month, laying off more than 2,500 primarily immigrant workers “virtually overnight.” Although Tyson Foods CEO and President Donnie King made over $34 million last year, nearly 800 times more than the median Tyson worker, the company cites a historic 75-year low in the U.S. cattle herd as a primary reason for the closure.