Today's Liberal News

Ellen Cushing

What Not to Wear

As long as people have been able to dress in color, we’ve been desperate to do it better. In the mid-19th century, advances in dyeing technology and synthetic organic chemistry allowed the textile industry, previously limited to what was available in nature, to mass-produce a rainbow’s worth of new shades. The problem was, people began wearing some truly awful outfits, driven to clashy maximalism by this revolution in color.

Thanksgiving Recipes Keep Getting More Outlandish

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Sometimes, at a party or on the internet, you will encounter someone who is unimpressed by human ingenuity. The pace of technological progress has stalled, they’ll say. Our art is getting dumber. We aren’t as creative as we used to be.

Thanksgiving Should Be in October

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You are so tired! I can tell because I’m tired too. In a couple of days, tens of millions of Americans will get on planes or trains or highways, crunching our limbs in godless ways for hours on end, worrying if we left the stove on or packed enough layers. We will fight the crowds, brave the chaos, pay the money. And then we will get to wherever we’re going, and we’ll eat.

Climate Change Comes for Baseball

It happened fast. Almost as soon as Hurricane Milton bore down on South Florida last month, high winds began shredding the roof of Tropicana Field, home for 26 years to the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team. Gigantic segments of Teflon-coated fiberglass flapped in the wind, then sheared off entirely.

Don’t Cancel The Washington Post. Cancel Amazon Prime.

The biggest story in months about media and democracy wasn’t an article—it was the absence of one. The news broke yesterday afternoon: For the first time in almost 50 years, The Washington Post would not be endorsing a presidential candidate. In fact, it would be ending the practice altogether. An endorsement—of Kamala Harris—had been drafted by “editorial page staffers,” a Post article reported, but then came the decision not to publish it.

A $700 Kitchen Tool That’s Meant to Be Seen, Not Used

Wood, I don’t think I need to work too hard to convince you, is a fairly amazing substance. It grows out of the ground and then becomes some of the most important things in the world: pencils, baseball bats, clogs, porch swings, campfires, crucifixes, tall shelves filled with books (which are also wood, if you squint a little). Solomon’s temple was wood; so was the Mayflower. So were Kane’s Rosebud and Prince’s guitar.

A Hundred Years of Mocking Vegetarians

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
Anthony Bourdain was beloved for his openness to new experiences, for his willingness to eat anything—brains; shark; cobra heart, still beating—with anyone. But he did reserve one bias: The man hated vegetarians.

What Color Is a Hot Dog?

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Two years ago, I had a conversation that I have thought about almost every day since. Some pals and I were playing a board game, and—don’t worry, I will not try to explain the rules of a board game to you here. But suffice it to say, it involved naming colors.

Enough With Saving the Honeybees

Everyone, for so long, has been worried about the honeybees. Governments, celebrities, social-media users, small businesses, multinational conglomerates—in the two decades or so since news emerged that American honeybees were disappearing, all manner of entities with a platform or a wallet have taken up and abandoned countless other causes, but they can’t quit trying to save the bees.
In 2022, at least 18 states enacted bee-related legislation.

When Canola Was a New Word

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. Sign up here.You can tell a lot about a cultural moment by the words it invents. New phenomena, products, social movements, and moods require new language, and an idea without a name is unlikely to stick.

‘Where Is the Line Where Immoral Becomes Evil?’

Editor’s Note: In yesterday’s keynote at Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy, a conference hosted by The Atlantic and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, Maria Ressa compared the impact of social media on our information ecosystem in recent years to that of an atom bomb: destructive, all-consuming, irreversible.

How Facebook Fails 90 Percent of Its Users

In the fall of 2019, Facebook launched a massive effort to combat the use of its platforms for human trafficking. Working around the clock, its employees searched Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram for keywords and hashtags that promoted domestic servitude in the Middle East and elsewhere. Over the course of a few weeks, the company took down 129,191 pieces of content, disabled more than 1,000 accounts, tightened its policies, and added new ways to detect this kind of behavior.

Cancel Prime

Today is Prime Day. Imagine trying to explain that to an alien or to a time traveler from the 20th century. “Amazon turned 20 and on the eve of its birthday, the company introduced Prime Day, a global shopping event,” reads Amazon’s formal telling of the ritual’s 2015 origins. “Our only goal? Offer a volume of deals greater than Black Friday, exclusively for Prime members.” The holiday was invented by a corporation in honor of itself, to enrich itself.