Today's Liberal News

Isabel Fattal

Why You Already Forgot That Book Plot

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.Before writing this newsletter about how hard it is to remember things, I decided to test myself. I wasn’t sure how much of the recent culture I’d consumed would jolt back into my brain; if it turned out I was a memory savant, I figured I should mention that here.

What Snow Days Mean to Adults

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.Shortly after our writer Katherine J. Wu, “a born-and-bred Californian,” moved to Boston, she was met with an epic snowstorm—one so bad that the city ran out of places to dump the snow piles. As you can imagine, she wasn’t thrilled.

How to Build a Happier 2023

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.Rebecca Rashid produces an Atlantic podcast called How to Build a Happy Life. The series, hosted by Arthur C. Brooks, joins scientific data with snapshots of human experience to help listeners find the path to a more fulfilling existence.

A Year of Botched Executions

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.This year, the state of Alabama botched three consecutive executions by lethal injection: One man died after three hours of apparent torture, while two others lived. “The state’s incompetence,” Elizabeth Bruenig wrote last month, is “a civil-rights crisis.

A Year of Botched Executions

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.This year, the state of Alabama botched three consecutive executions by lethal injection: One man died after three hours of apparent torture, while two others lived. “The state’s incompetence,” Elizabeth Bruenig wrote last month, is “a civil-rights crisis.

Why Are We Awkward?

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.Like most other humans I know, I’m still trying to remember how to act normal when socializing.

How to Enjoy the Holidays Your Way

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.My colleague Faith Hill focuses much of her writing on what people actually need and want in day-to-day life, and why those needs aren’t as universal as we might assume.

The Wild Future of Artificial Intelligence

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.OpenAI’s impressive new artificial-intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, has intensified the debate over what the rise of AI-generated writing and art means for work, culture, education, and more.

Why We Buy What We Do

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.“I don’t like to shop, but I do like to buy,” Frances Taylor wrote in The Atlantic in 1931. In an essay called “Who Wants My Money?,” Taylor laments how inconvenient the process of shopping is.

How We Could Discover Alien Life

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.Fifty years ago this week, NASA launched the Apollo 17 mission. When that crew returned, President Richard Nixon said “this may be the last time in this century that men will walk on the moon”—and he was right.

How Vast Is the Cosmos, Really?

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.There are billions of planets in our galaxy, and billions of galaxies in the observable universe. Those numbers are impossible to picture, but NASA’s newest space telescope is helping us see the universe’s depths in unprecedented detail.

Thanksgiving After Fleeing the Taliban

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.In August of last year, the Afghan journalist Bushra Seddique, now a 23-year-old editorial fellow at The Atlantic, fled Kabul, smuggling her laptop past the Taliban and leaving members of her family behind. I called Bushra, now living in the Washington D.C.

Why We Eat Together

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.For human beings, a meal is never just a meal, and a snack is never just a snack. As the writer and scientist Louise O.

Enjoying Soccer in Its Dark Age

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.Franklin Foer, a staff writer who is contributing to The Atlantic’s new World Cup pop-up newsletter, The Great Game, has been a soccer fan since he was a kid in the 1980s. I talked with Frank about the disturbing aspects of this year’s Cup and what keeps him coming back to the sport.

What Is Contrition Without Reparation?

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.For our December cover story, our staff writer Clint Smith—who has written a book about historical sites and memorials of slavery in America—spent time in Germany, visiting sites of Holocaust memory and studying the debates around them.

Everything We Know About Dreams

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

The Secrets of Language

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.Ever feel like the person you’re talking to is just waiting for you to finish so they can start speaking? It turns out every human does that. And it’s a good thing—not necessarily a sign of a bad listener, but a complex communication skill that bonds humans across the world.

America After Affirmative Action

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 Supreme Court may soon rule against race-conscious admissions at colleges and universities. I called the Atlantic staff writer Adam Harris to talk about how this week’s news fits into the broader story of higher education in America.

Ghost Stories for Nonbelievers

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.In December of 1908, the writer and Presbyterian minister Frank Crane published an article in The Atlantic called “Ghosts.” In it, he explains that as you grow up, the good ghosts die young, and the bad ones live on.

The Moment in 2012 That Foreshadowed Trump’s Rise

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.Since Donald Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, “an industry of rationalization and justification has thrived,” David French wrote last week.

Why Conspiracy Theorists Always Land on the Jews

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.Late on Saturday, Ye (formerly Kanye West) tweeted to his 31 million followers that he planned to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.

The Burnout Crisis in Pink-Collar Work

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 teachers, nurses, and child-care workers who haven’t already left their jobs because of low pay and stress are hitting their limit.

Geek Wars

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.Pop-culture franchises such as Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones—which grew this year to include Amazon’s The Rings of Power and HBO’s House of the Dragon, respectively—have recently begun diversifying their casts.

The Problem With New Cars

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.

Why America’s Floors Turned Gray

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.Today our staff writer Amanda Mull answers my questions about her recent article exploring gray floors, house flipping, and how America fell under HGTV’s spell.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.
King Charles should get ready to abdicate.

One of Long COVID’s Most Misunderstood Symptoms

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.Brain fog is one of the most destructive symptoms of long COVID—and one of the most misunderstood.

How the DOJ Used Trump’s Methods Against Him

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.“Trump can’t hide from the Mar-a-Lago photo,” my colleague David A. Graham wrote yesterday. I called David today to talk about what makes the DOJ’s latest filing so powerful.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

America’s Baffling Booster Messaging

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.Today the FDA authorized two updated COVID-19 vaccines, making the new shots available to millions of Americans as early as next week. (Wondering when you should get yours? Our science editor Rachel Gutman-Wei has a useful guide.

How Early-2000s Pop Culture Changed Sex

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 feminist writer and activist Ellen Willis is best known for defining the idea of pro-sex feminism in the 1980s. But only a little while later, Willis noticed that women’s liberated sexuality had turned out to be, as she put it, “often depressingly shallow, exploitative, and joyless.

Is Politics Filling the Void of Religion?

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 Atlantic writer Helen Lewis, now an atheist, was raised in the Catholic Church. She was once asked if her feminist convictions as an adult play a similar role to the Catholicism of her youth.