Today's Liberal News

What would be a life-changing amount of money for you? $20,000? $200,000?

When you hear the phrase “life-changing amount of money,” what is the number that comes to your mind? According to one 2019 poll, the average American named $19,800 as the amount that would change their life—but for millennials, it was just $5,000. On the other hand, in April 2021, an unnamed tech millionaire wrote in New York magazine: “I thought that I’d make a little bit from an IPO, maybe $200,000.

A Pandemic Guide to Anime: Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!

Welcome back to our impromptu and sporadically scheduled pandemic guide to anime. If you’ve missed any of our earlier entries, you can find them all here; for our introductory post, you can go here.

We’ll close out our current batch of suggestions with, appropriately, something that’s completely different from all the others. Almost completely different, that is. Like many of the others, it’s a school comedy.

The Sly Sunniness of Betty White

In 1973, before the series’ fourth season, the producers of The Mary Tyler Moore Show discussed the casting of a new character they were soon to introduce. Sue Ann Nivens, the host of the Happy Homemaker program on the fictional WJM-TV news station, would be cunning and cutting and a foil for her colleague Mary’s adamant optimism.

Five Lessons in Creativity From Metallica

Metallica’s “Sad but True” is one of the metal canon’s great statements. The groove is ogre-ishly heavy, downtuned, encumbered, a fantastically oppressed/oppressing trudge, with guitar notes that seem to bend and bow under the conditions of existence itself—the incurved gravity between God’s hands.As for the lyrics, they are rich with a kind of deep-space irony.

The Truth About Prohibition

The Prohibition era, which for most Americans conjures images of “untouchable” lawmen, tommy-gun-toting gangsters, and jazz-filled speakeasies, is easily one of the most romanticized periods in U.S. history. It’s also one of the most misunderstood. We now vilify the temperance activists who promoted public welfare and excuse corrupt and murderous gangsters such as Al Capone as “legitimate businessmen” who only wanted to slake the thirst of paying customers.

Arundhati Roy on the Media, Vaccine Inequity, Authoritarianism in India & Challenging U.S. Wars

We go to New Delhi, India, to speak with acclaimed Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy about the pandemic, U.S. militarism and the state of journalism. Roy first appeared on Democracy Now! after receiving widespread backlash for speaking out against the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. At the time, her emphatic antiwar stance clashed with the rising tides of patriotism and calls for war after 9/11. “Now the same media is saying what we were saying 20 years ago,” says Roy.

Photo gallery: On San Juan Island, 2021 was the Year of the Foxes

Friday Harbor, Washington: It surprises people to learn that there’s a population of red foxes on remote San Juan Island, up in the northwestern-most corner of the Lower 48 states. They’re not a native species, but they’ve been here long enough that they’ve carved a niche into the ecosystem and are now a celebrated component of the island’s phenomenal wildlife.

Final note: Musicians who passed in 2021, Part Two

Below I will list some of the names of musicians who passed away in 2021. It will be a solid list, and I’ll link to larger and more robust obituaries throughout, but it’s almost entirely made up of American artists and people who found success in America. I ask your forgiveness in advance for the people I miss. I mean no disrespect and would appreciate their mentions in the comments, or stories you may have related to any of the music-makers listed below.

A Pandemic Guide to Anime: Zombie Land Saga

Welcome back to our impromptu and sporadically scheduled pandemic guide to anime. If you’ve missed any of our earlier entries, you can find them all here; for our introductory post you can go here, yada yada yada, introduction done.

All right, recent entries have ranged from the perils of high school life to the perils of the afterlife.

Prism’s top stories of 2021

by Ashton Lattimore

This article was originally published at Prism

This year has been marked by political and public health turmoil, environmental disasters, and widespread social injustice, and it’s strained our communities and inspired us to imagine and demand better futures.

We held a panel on ableism, and we listened. Your turn

When people talk about their experiences, listen. Truly listen. Take in what they’re saying and not just how what they’re saying affects you. It’s a simple means of education, but the good news is, it’s completely free—no tuition, no registration. Someone else does all the work, and you get all the benefits.

Those benefits with regards to a virtual panel we hosted with our Daily Kos staff in December simply cannot be quantified.