Today's Liberal News

Ukraine update: As Russia finally gains ground in eastern Ukraine, a reminder why it matters little

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I’ve never understood Ukraine’s defense of Severodonetsk. I posted this image on May 26…

… and wrote: 

I circled Sloviansk and Kramatorsk in the map above as a reminder, that even if Russia takes Severodonetsk (probable) and Lysychansk (less probable), any such advance will crash at the gates of [the] heavily fortified cities [of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk], with clear supply lines and artillery support to their west.

Survey reveals Black immigrant domestic workers continue to face pandemic-related instability

Black immigrant domestic workers who were already vulnerable in their workplace settings have continued to struggle more than two years since the onset of the pandemic, new survey findings show. The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) Black Worker Initiative and the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) said that 37% of respondents from a survey of 1,000 domestic workers revealed the’ve had difficulty finding work.

What Trump Has Taken From Us

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.I am appalled, as so many Americans are, that Donald Trump and his team assaulted our elections, but today I’m thinking about how the assault on election officials across the nation is an even deeper wound that will take years to heal.But first, here are three great new stories from The Atlantic.

Want Closer Friendships? Move Away From Your Friends.

Adult friendships can be tricky to maintain. People move away from their college town as schooling ends, careers begin and monopolize our time, socializing at happy hours can start to lose its appeal as you get older. And during the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of Americans moved from cities full of their friends to less populated areas.

When the Punishment Doesn’t Fit the Joke

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

The Comment That Reveals the Depths of the Republican Party’s Moral Collapse

Finding signs to worry about the future of American democracy is not hard, but few are quite so painful and acute as the cognitive dissonance displayed by Rusty Bowers this week.Bowers, the Republican speaker of the Arizona State House, was the star witness during yesterday’s hearing of the U.S. House’s January 6 committee. Bowers calls himself a conservative Republican, and he has the record to back that claim up.

A Mystery That Took 13,200 Years to Crack

In 1998, outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana, a hydraulic excavator at Buesching’s Peat Moss & Mulch stripped back a layer of peat and struck bone in the underlying marl. Bone is the right word: This bone belonged to a mastodon, and mastodons are still fresh bodies in the dirt, not petrified fossils entombed in the rock. Although they might be popularly imagined living way back with the dinosaurs, the Ice Age megafauna went extinct only moments ago, in staggered waves over human history.

Georgia Poll Workers Falsely Targeted by Trump as “Scammers” Faced Racist Harassment, Lived in Fear

In some of the most dramatic testimony from the fourth hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Shaye Moss, a Black election worker in Georgia, and her mother Ruby Freeman described how their lives were forever changed in December of 2020 when Trump’s top campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani claimed they manipulated ballots to rig the election outcome in the state, which was among those he had lost.

Harvard’s Deep Ties to Slavery: Report Shows It Profited, Then Tried to Erase History of Complicity

In the final part of our Juneteenth special broadcast, we look at Harvard University’s recent report detailing the school’s extensive ties to slavery and pledged $100 million for a fund for scholars to continue to research the topic. The report documents dozens of prominent people associated with Harvard who enslaved people, including four Harvard presidents.

Send in the clowns? Don’t bother, they’re here

In the Academy Award-winning 1984 film Amadeus, F. Murray Abraham brilliantly portrayed Antonio Salieri as a mediocre court composer who was so threatened by the meteoric rise and prodigious talents of Wolfgang Mozart that he spent the better part of his life mired in spite, trying to bring Mozart down.