Today's Liberal News

Don’t Call It a Global Banking Crisis

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 near-collapse of the global banking behemoth Credit Suisse, shortly following two high-profile American bank failures, complicates regulators’ efforts to restore confidence in the banking system. It’s also stoking fears of a contagion effect across the financial sector worldwide.

The Rise of Gender-Neutral Names Isn’t What It Seems

Baby names just aren’t what they used to be. You can see it these days in all the little Blakes and Emersons and Phoenixes and Robins—and if you can’t immediately tell whether I’m talking about boy or girl names, then ah, yes, that’s exactly it. When it comes to baby naming, we’re at peak androgyny.

A Major Clue to COVID’s Origins Is Just Out of Reach

Updated at 2:45 p.m. on March 21, 2023
Last week, the ongoing debate about COVID-19’s origins acquired a new plot twist. A French evolutionary biologist stumbled across a trove of genetic sequences extracted from swabs collected from surfaces at a wet market in Wuhan, China, shortly after the pandemic began; she and an international team of colleagues downloaded the data in hopes of understanding who—or what—might have ferried the virus into the venue.

Is This the Singularity for Standardized Tests?

Last fall, when generative AI abruptly started turning out competent high-school- and college-level writing, some educators saw it as an opportunity. Perhaps it was time, at last, to dispose of the five-paragraph essay, among other bad teaching practices that have lingered for generations. Universities and colleges convened emergency town halls before winter terms began to discuss how large language models might reshape their work, for better and worse.

Woke Is Just Another Word for Liberal

The conservative writer Bethany Mandel, a co-author of a new book attacking “wokeness” as “a new version of leftism that is aimed at your child,” recently froze up on a cable news program when asked by an interviewer how she defines woke, the term her book is about.On the one hand, any of us with a public-facing job could have a similar moment of disassociation on live television. On the other hand, the moment and the debate it sparked revealed something important.

War Made Easy: Norman Solomon on How Mainstream Media Helped Pave Way for U.S. Invasion of Iraq

As we continue to mark the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we look at how the corporate U.S. media helped pave the way for war by uncritically amplifying lies and misrepresentations from the Bush administration while silencing voices of dissent. Longtime media critic Norman Solomon says many of the same media personalities and news outlets that pushed aggressively for the invasion then are now helping to solidify an elite consensus around the Ukraine war.

Remembering Mozambican Rapper Azagaia: Police Crack Down on Protests After Death of Cultural Icon

We speak with Dipti Bhatnagar, climate justice activist based in Mozambique, about the recent death on March 9 of the popular rapper and cultural icon Azagaia. He was just 38 years old. He inspired many with his music and sang about injustice, including mistreatment of people by the authorities, as well as about poverty and social injustice. Azagaia’s death has sparked protests in Mozambique which authorities have violently suppressed.

U.N. Warns “Climate Time Bomb Is Ticking” as Cyclone Freddy Death Toll Tops 560 in Malawi & Mozambique

In a major new report released Monday, the United Nations is calling for immediate and drastic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in order to stop global warming. The “final warning” by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change comes as the death toll from Cyclone Freddy just swept through southeast Africa, killing hundreds of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more.