Today's Liberal News

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Late Night Snark: Biden’s BFD Edition

“President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act—a huge achievement. It makes the single-biggest investment in addressing climate change ever. While I’m here, I should probably talk about some of the other existential threats facing our nation: the enormous gaps in wealth and income, the threats to our democracy. But I really think one of the most serious issues facing our country today is just how big a dick Ted Cruz is.

New social media mashup proves GOP and right-wing media talking points in step with the KKK

I think it’s fair to say that most people in the Black, brown, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ communities have long believed that there is scant difference between the ideologies of Republicans, the right-wing media, and the Ku Klux Klan. History proves it, and present-day commentary verifies it.

A new video from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah places right-wing media talking heads—like Tucker Carlson and Greg Kelly—alongside GOP elected officials—like Rep.

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.

Eight Books That Will Lead You Down a Rabbit Hole

There is something particularly literary about obsession. After all, being inside a good book can feel like being tugged down a rabbit hole, without an end in sight. To read a novel is to absorb the thoughts of another, to limit your point of view to the pages in front of you—to see, in your mind’s eye, what is depicted or suggested but not literally there.

A New Way to Think About Our Filing Systems

In The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information, Craig Robertson chronicles the history and influence of the titular 19th-century invention that revolutionized offices. The machine—for it was advertised as a piece of high-tech equipment rather than as a mundane furniture item—promised corporations a new level of capitalist efficiency. All company information could be quickly classified and stored according to a rigid system, and then just as easily retrieved.

“No Tech for ICE”: Data Broker LexisNexis Sued for Helping ICE Target Immigrant Communities

A coalition of immigrant rights organizations have sued the data broker LexisNexis for collecting detailed personal information on millions of people and then selling it to governmental entities, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The lawsuit alleges LexisNexis has helped create “a massive surveillance state with files on almost every adult U.S. consumer,” and accuses ICE of using information collected by LexisNexis to circumvent local policies in sanctuary cities.

Palestinian NGOs Speak Out After Israeli Forces Raid Offices & Declare Them to Be “Terrorist” Groups

Israeli forces raided and closed the offices of seven Palestinian civil society rights groups in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, six of which Israeli authorities had designated as terrorist groups last year. The raid came as the United Nations condemned Israel for killing 19 Palestinian children in recent weeks, and 100 days after Israeli forces shot dead Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh while covering an Israeli military raid in the Jenin refugee camp.

I Can’t Wait Out the Pandemic Any Longer

The last time I tried to wait out the pandemic, I drove south. My dog and I traveled nine hours from San Francisco to the Anza-Borrego Desert, which sprawls over more than half a million acres near the Mexican border. Most of that territory is untouched wilderness, rocky washes home to deer, pumas, and golden eagles.The place felt solitary. That’s why I chose it. I work as a doctor in an emergency room, a hospital, and an HIV clinic.

What Will the Future of Kenya Look Like? Nanjala Nyabola on 2022 Disputed Election, Drought & More

Kenya is facing a political crisis following last week’s presidential election, with the apparent runner-up rejecting the results of the vote and the apparent president-elect announcing plans to form a new government. We speak with Nairobi-based writer and political analyst Nanjala Nyabola, who says the Kenyan elections yield “terrible candidates,” with the most recent election results following a decades-long tradition of election interference and miscommunication.

The Help That Never Came

At the start of the 2020 lockdown, we had a 3-year-old who needed near-constant supervision. My third grader, in public school, generally had about an hour’s worth of unchallenging remote lessons a day. We were grateful that our downstairs tenant, who lives alone and is a freelancer, agreed to share a bubble with us and provide 20 hours a week of child care in exchange for a break on rent.My husband has a challenging job and makes more money than I do. He tries hard to be egalitarian.

John Nichols: “Standing Up to Donald Trump in the Republican Party … Leads to Your Defeat”

We look at the outcome of Tuesday’s primaries for opponents of former President Trump. In Wyoming, Liz Cheney, Trump’s chief House Republican foe, lost her primary to a Trump-backed challenger. In Alaska, Senator Lisa Murkowski, another Republican Trump critic, will move forward to the general election alongside a Trump challenger who also advanced under the state’s ranked-choice voting system.

News Roundup: Mar-a-Lago affidavit could be released; Ukraine nuclear plant may be in new danger

Republican crimes continued to dominate the news today because, really, how could they not; as a Florida judge mulls a media request to publicly release the evidence-filled affidavit used by the government to justify the Mar-a-Lago search, Donald Trump’s longtime chief financial officer pleads guilty to tax fraud, and the Justice Department is asking the National Archives to turn over the same list of documents that the House committee investigating the Jan.

Ukraine update: Russia delivers dark hints of a ‘man-made catastrophe’ at occupied nuclear plant

Over the last three weeks, attention has focused on the behind-the-lines attacks made by Ukraine on Russian bases, supply depots, and infrastructure. For good reasons. These attacks, made with a combination of precision weapons—including possible Ukrainian forces on the ground many kilometers inside areas Russia considered “safe”—have changed the entire tone of the war.

Lawmakers call Border Patrol’s seizure of religious items from Sikh migrants ‘egregious violation’

U.S. border agents in the Yuma sector have seized turbans from almost 50 Sikh asylum-seekers in recent weeks, civil rights advocates said in an alarming letter earlier this month. But volunteers with an immigrant advocacy group along the borderlands revealed the number could actually be into the hundreds, and that these religious freedom violations have also stretched into the Tucson sector. Lawmakers are now demanding answers in an Aug.

Biden’s Climate Law Is Ending 40 Years of Hands-off Government

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. It is no exaggeration to say that his signature immediately severed the history of climate change in America into two eras. Before the IRA, climate campaigners spent decades trying and failing to get a climate bill through the Senate. After it, the federal government will spend $374 billion on clean energy and climate resilience over the next 10 years.

How the FBI Search Revived Trump

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.One takeaway from the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, Elaine Godfrey wrote earlier this week, is “the simple fact that an angry septuagenarian still holds the Grand Old Party in a vise grip.