Today's Liberal News

The Atlantic Daily: What Covid Could Look Like One Year From Now

Every weekday evening, our editors guide you through the biggest stories of the day, help you discover new ideas, and surprise you with moments of delight. Subscribe to get this delivered to your inbox.The United States is logging record-setting numbers of coronavirus cases in the final week of 2021. The country is now averaging more than 300,000 new cases per day as it prepares to enter a third calendar year spent battling the pandemic.

The Books Briefing: 5 Short Stories to Read This Weekend

Editor’s note: This week’s newsletter is a rerun.
We’ll be back with a fresh newsletter next week.
I often think of fiction as fact’s partner in the pursuit of truth. At its best, the genre is capable of rendering the worlds we’re unable to imagine, and also of revealing the ones hidden around us. Last year, The Atlantic recommitted itself to publishing fiction with greater frequency.

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.

Watch: Bigg’s killer whales hunting seals along rocky Salish Sea coastline

There are two distinct populations of killer whales in the Salish Sea. The most famous are the so-called Southern Resident killer whales, an endangered clan currently down to 73 members. But there’s an entirely different orca ecotype—who have not had any kind of genetic interaction, according to scientists, for at least 300,000 years and perhaps longer, with the SRKWs—who are known as “transient” orcas, scientifically known as “Bigg’s” whales.

Legacy of Black architect Paul Williams is not new but it’s worthy of celebration all the same

Having lived in California for about half a decade, I’m embarrassed to write that I only learned of Paul Revere Williams when I came across a social media post about him circulating Twitter and Facebook decades after his death. The post, confirmed by KABC, reads: “Paul Williams was a Black architect who learned to draw upside down so he could sit across from clients, as many of them in the 1920’s wouldn’t sit next to him.

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.