Today's Liberal News

The Two Reasons Parents Regret Having Kids

Olivia Arthur / Magnum
Updated at 11:30 A.M. ET on August 31, 2021Carrie wishes that she’d never had children. She spent a few years feeling satisfied as a mother, but now locks herself in the kitchen and wonders, Who am I? What am I doing here? She can’t pursue paid work, because she has to shepherd her 12-year-old and 10-year-old to school as well as to therapy appointments for their disabilities. Carrie, who lives in the U.K.

Why We Need Terrifying Stories

Editor’s Note: Read Karen Brown’s new short story, “Needs.” “Needs” is a new short story by Karen Brown. To mark the story’s publication in The Atlantic, Brown and Oliver Munday, the design director of the magazine, discussed the story over email. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.Oliver Munday: Your story “Needs” takes place in a disquieting domestic setting in rural 1960s America.

Needs

Editor’s Note: Read an interview with Karen Brown about her writing process. Patty’s murder happened on a Tuesday afternoon in June, overcast and cool. You needed a sweater if you were going to work in the yard. It was 1966, a small town in Windham County, Connecticut. Milkweed and moths at screens, fields of corn and goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace. There were woods behind her new house, a cape, and small animals emerging from the shadows to scamper over the clover.

News Roundup: U.S. withdraws from Afghanistan; Ida damage widespread; DeSantis still a failure

In the news today: It’s August 31st in Afghanistan, and the United States military has officially “withdrawn” from the country, ending two decades of war. Mainstream political reports simply refuse to stop fluffing Florida’s pandemic-spreading Ron DeSantis even after the state becomes the epicenter of an outbreak now spreading throughout the South. Hurricane Ida slammed into Louisiana and Mississippi yesterday, causing widespread damage.

In Afghanistan, more violence and uncertainty as U.S. withdraws from a failed war

On Sunday, President Joe Biden traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to witness the return ceremony for the bodies of 13 U.S. service members killed in a suicide bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan, last week. It may not be the last such memorial; there is no good way for the United States to extricate itself from a war it has lost. Each remaining ceremony will be given the sort of attention the last decade’s worth of U.S.

The (tragic) timeline of an anti-vaxxer’s COVID death

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This tweet is spot on:

The 4 stages of COVID denial: 1. It’s a hoax. 2. Don’t be a sheep. 3. Prayers needed. 4. Visit our GoFundMe.— SP384 (@SpacePirates384) August 29, 2021

And what’s amazing is just how spot-on it is. Several subreddits over at Reddit, like the Herman Cain Award, have sprung forth to document these stories, repeated time and time again, every single day.

Maybe Republican threats to put the nation in default will break Manchin and Sinema on filibuster

House committees are presumably hard at work now, trying to meet a Sept. 15 deadline for completing their parts of the budget reconciliation bill that will fund President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan, the $3.5 trillion companion bill to the $550 billion hard infrastructure deal agreed to in the Senate. The reconciliation bill will originate in the House, but passage in the Senate requires that they work closely with committees there to avoid pitfalls.

God May Forgive Kanye West, but You Don’t Have To

To overcome what ails you, you must surrender. That is the third directive on the famous 12-step road map to sobriety and stability. Recovering from an internal battle that has had external repercussions means deciding “to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God,” according to the Alcoholics Anonymous guidebook, from which multitudes of 12-step programs—treating multitudes of psychological conditions—are modeled.