Today's Liberal News

Why Biden picked Powell

In the end, President Joe Biden did what many close to him expected: He took a longer-than-anticipated amount of time to arrive at a reasonable, moderate decision that thrilled few but carried limited risk.

“Furious and Disgusted”: Teen Survivor Speaks Out After Wealthy White Serial Rapist Gets Probation

The survivor of a serial rapist who received probation joins us to speak out after a New York judge sparked international outrage when he ruled it is inappropriate to jail the man who attacked her. Christopher Belter pleaded guilty to raping and sexually assaulting her along with three other teenage girls age 15 and 16, but he will avoid serving time in prison, and instead receive 8 years of probation.

“Why Are Ahmaud Arbery’s Killers So Scared?”: Self-Defense Claims by White Attackers Seen As Racist

Update on Nov. 24: Jurors on Wednesday afternoon returned guilty verdicts against all three of the white men charged with killing 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery in February 2020. Travis McMichael fired the fatal shots and was convicted on all counts, including the charge of malice murder. His father Gregory McMichael, a former police officer, and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan were convicted of felony murder and other charges.

Can You Bankrupt White Supremacy? Jury Holds Charlottesville Organizers Liable for $26M in Damages

A federal jury has ordered a group of white supremacists to pay over $26 million in damages for their role in organizing the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. “Is bankrupting these organizations, is bankrupting these individuals enough to actually stop the growing threat … of white supremacy and Nazism in the United States?” asks Slate senior editor Nicole Lewis. “I don’t think so.

Scientist with the best job ever studies laughter of babies, says it’s all ‘about the eye contact’

Developmental psychologist Caspar Addyman has the best job ever. He works to answer the age-old question: What makes babies laugh? This means Addyman spends most of his working days listening to, and decoding, the sound of what can only be described as the tittering of angels.

Addyman conducts experiments on human behavior, and his focus is on infants and toddlers.

The pandemic has been isolating, but I’ll always be grateful for one moment of community

Do you need to hear a happy story? A “so hundreds of thousands of people have died and large swaths of the country have refused to try to save lives and we’ve seen the Capitol attacked in an attempt to overturn an election but everything isn’t terrible all the time” kind of story?

So my son turned 4 early in this historic, life-altering pandemic, and obviously we had to cancel his birthday party.

I’m thankful for this 94-year-old Polish antifa veteran who continues to slam neo-fascists

Wanda Traczyk-Stawska is an outspoken 94-year-old Polish freedom fighter. She is a veteran of the Warsaw uprising, joining the resistance when she was 17 years old. Her youth and small stature earned her the nickname “Doughnut” within the resistance. She was a hardcore anti-fascist. She still is a hardcore anti-fascist. That fight extends today to the rights of women, migrants, and refugees.

Anti-vaxx Chronicles: He mocks GoFundMe campaigns. Guess what happens next

  • by

Facebook is a menace. COVID-19 is a menace. Conservatism is a cesspool. Together, those three ingredients have created a toxic stew of malevolent death and devastation. We can talk about all those things in the abstract, look at the numbers and statistics, and catch the occasional whiff of seditionist right-wing rhetoric.

This Thanksgiving, Remember the Curse of Ham

This article originally appeared in Imani Perry’s newsletter, Unsettled Territory, free through November 30 and available with an Atlantic subscription after that. Sign up here.Charles Waddell Chesnutt would hardly qualify as a representative of late-19th-century Black experience. Born in 1858 in Ohio to parents who had been free people of color in Fayetteville, North Carolina, his skin was so light that he could easily “pass” for white. But he didn’t.

It Wasn’t a Hoax

If Donald Trump had been supported only by people who affirmatively liked him, his attack on American democracy would never have gotten as far as it did.Instead, at almost every turn, Trump was helped by people who had little liking for him as a human being or politician, but assessed that he could be useful for purposes of their own. The latest example: the suddenly red-hot media campaign to endorse Trump’s fantasy that he was the victim of a “Russia hoax.

Philip Yancey’s Message of Grace

On a Sunday in late February 2007, Philip Yancey was driving on a remote highway near Alamosa, Colorado. As he came around an icy curve, his Ford Explorer began to fishtail; the tire slipped off the asphalt and the Explorer tumbled down a hillside. The windows were blown out; skis, boots, luggage, and a laptop computer were strewn over the snow.Yancey suffered minor cuts and bruises on his face and limbs and a persistent nosebleed, but he also felt an intense pain in his neck.

What Slavery Looked Like in the West

Early travelers to the American West encountered unfree people nearly everywhere they went: on ranches and farmsteads, in mines and private homes, and even on the open market, bartered like any other tradable good. Unlike on southern plantations, these men, women, and children weren’t primarily African American; most were Native American. Tens of thousands of Indigenous people labored in bondage across the western United States in the mid-19th century.