Today's Liberal News

What’s the Most Crucial Part of the Clinton Affair?

If you’re in the mood for ’90s nostalgia, the first episode of Impeachment: American Crime Story is a scrunchie-wearing, SlimFast-drinking, Jane magazine–reading coast down memory lane. It has shopping malls and step-aerobics classes and pagers and the Gap, where Monica Lewinsky bought a sapphire-blue collared dress that would become one of that decade’s most defining emblems.

A Strategy of Confusion

On the verge of a landmark victory by judicial fiat, the Republican Party is being strangely quiet.As my colleague David Graham has written, Republican Party leaders and conservative intellectuals haven’t been trumpeting the Supreme Court’s decision to allow a Texas ban on abortions to go forward, which for women in the state has all but nullified the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that guaranteed the right to an abortion.

The Books Briefing: The Uneasy Place of Politics in Fiction

In Sally Rooney’s novels, idealistic college students espouse Marxism despite never having read any of the ideology’s foundational texts; they advocate for radicalism while keeping up their grades and wrestling with deeply traditional romantic desires. They are startlingly realistic—but their role as political actors is much fuzzier. Indeed Rooney has long been criticized as insufficiently political.

Shared Grief After 9/11: Sister of WTC Victim Meets Afghan Who Lost 19 Family Members in U.S. Attack

On the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we revisit a conversation we hosted in January of 2002 between Masuda Sultan, an Afghan American woman who lost 19 members of her family in a U.S. air raid, and Rita Lasar, a New Yorker who lost her brother in the World Trade Center attack. Lasar would become an active member of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Masuda later wrote the memoir, “My War at Home.

Rep. Barbara Lee, Who Cast Sole Vote After 9/11 Against “Forever Wars,” on Need for Afghan War Inquiry

Twenty years ago, Rep. Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against war in the immediate aftermath of the devastating 9/11 attacks that killed about 3,000 people. “Let us not become the evil that we deplore,” she urged her colleagues in a dramatic address on the House floor. The final vote in the House was 420-1. This week, as the U.S. marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11, Rep.

“Will Corporate Greed Prolong the Pandemic?”: Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz on Global Vaccine Equity

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says global vaccine inequity endangers everyone on the planet, including those in rich countries, and says the best way to solve the problem is to drastically increase production of COVID-19 vaccines. “As long as the disease is festering someplace in the world, there are going to be mutations,” Stiglitz says. “So it’s in our own self-interest that we get the disease controlled everywhere.

News Roundup: Biden fed up with COVID-19’s willing allies; Justice takes on Texas abortion ban

In the news today: In an uncharacteristically blunt speech, President Joe Biden let loose on those still prolonging the pandemic by refusing vaccinations and other safety measures while announcing a broad program of mandatory vaccinations for government workers and large employers. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the Department of Justice would indeed be filing suit to block Texas Republicans’ new near-total abortion ban.

Former Trump press secretary who ‘knows where the bodies are buried’ is working on a tell-all book

The latest tell-all from a former Trump associate promises to be a real barnburner and/or barf-bagger, depending on your current tolerance for the perpetually eye-popping evidence of Donald Trump’s treachery and bottomless bad taste.

At this point in the game, it’s difficult to envision what sort of scandal, if any, could possibly change anyone’s mind about Trump.

Biden approval plummets—to ‘still better than anything Trump could attain in nearly 4 years’ levels

Afghanistan! Delta variant! Hurricanes! Wildfires! Chaos, chaos, chaos! Hie thee to thine lifeboats, fellow Americans! The good ship Biden is sinking!

The evidence? President Joe Biden’s approval ratings have now sunk to a roughly 45% average based on FiveThirtyEight’s latest aggregate of polls. As usual, the media is doing its news cycle tango, questioning Biden’s ability to push through his agenda in the face of these numbers.

We’re Asking the Impossible of Vaccines

In 1846, the Danish physician Peter Ludvig Panum traveled to the Faroe Islands in search of measles. The rocky archipelago, which sits some 200 miles north of Scotland, had been slammed with an outbreak, and Panum was dispatched by his government to investigate.

The Atlantic Hires Roye Segal to Lead Atlantic Re:think

The Atlantic has hired Roye Segal to lead Atlantic Re:think, Publisher and Chief Revenue Officer Hayley Romer announced today. Segal joins The Atlantic to head the award-winning creative studio, which is part of Atlantic Brand Partners, an interdisciplinary collective within The Atlantic that offers brands an integrated experience across platforms. Segal was most recently at NBCUniversal, where he was senior creative director.