Today's Liberal News

Marc Novicoff

Republicans Are in Trouble, but Democrats Could Blow It

In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump carried Tennessee’s Seventh Congressional District by 22 points. Last night, in a special election to represent the district, the Republican Matt Van Epps won by only nine points, defeating State Representative Aftyn Behn, a Democrat.
Trump celebrated the outcome on Truth Social as a “BIG Congressional WIN,” but the margin of victory in a deep-red district is ominous for Republicans.

The Company Making a Mockery of State Gambling Bans

Americans who want to bet on sports have many options. There’s DraftKings, FanDuel, ESPN Bet, Caesars, and BetMGM. There’s also BetRivers, Hard Rock, bet365, Fanatics, and Bally Bet. But none of those platforms are available in the 17 states where online sports betting remains illegal, including California and Texas.  
Kalshi, a prediction market, doesn’t have that limitation. Gamblers can use it to wager on the outcome of sporting events in all 50 states.

The Life Cycle of Facial Hair

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
My facial hair arrived without warning. The real kind, not the middle-school variety, greeted me when I was 21 and returning to college after a year off. I found this development annoying: My face had suddenly assigned me the chore of having to shave it very often.
I should’ve read my Charles Dawson Shanly.

The Logical End Point of College Sports

Cade Haskins averaged just 0.9 points a game this season for one of the worst teams in all of Division I college basketball. And yet he may turn out to be responsible for triggering one of the biggest changes in the sport’s history.
Last month, in a small HR office above the only sports bar in Hanover, New Hampshire, Haskins and his teammates on the Dartmouth College basketball squad voted to form the first-ever NCAA players’ union.