Today's Liberal News

Ukraine update: Balancing desperate needs and uncomfortable reality

Over the course of the now more than two-month-long invasion of Ukraine, kos has written several times about the difficulty of integrating unfamiliar weapons systems into an army—especially when that army is already engaged in a life-or-death struggle. Every single one of these systems comes with its own training requirements, not just for the person whose finger is on the trigger, but for all the mechanics, electricians, and support crews needed to keep it operating in the field.

Elon Musk Already Showed Us How He’ll Run Twitter

Last night, after Twitter accepted his $44 billion bid to buy the company, Elon Musk traveled to South Texas, where SpaceX is building prototypes for a rocket system designed to take people to Mars someday. Earlier, he had shared some of his to-do list for the social-media company he could soon own outright: “enhancing the product with new features,” “defeating the spam bots,” and making the platform’s algorithms public and available for anyone to see.

The Elon Musk Placebo Effect

Elon Musk is buying Twitter and taking the public company private in order to save “free speech.” That much we know: He has made his intentions clear.But what will actually change about the social-media platform is still largely a mystery, and the hints don’t suggest that Twitter’s about to become a free-speech free-for-all. Maybe Musk will reinstate Donald Trump on the platform.

The Netflix Bubble Is Finally Bursting

Ten years ago, Netflix started offering its subscribers exclusive TV shows (we all, of course, remember the hit series Lilyhammer). An approach that at first seemed like a fad quickly yielded a handful of awards juggernauts—and then became a model for the entire TV streaming industry. For the past decade, the company has spent freely to fatten its library, eventually making hundreds of shows and movies a year, with the goal of staying ahead of its many online rivals.

Mussolini Speaks, and Tells Us How Democracy Dies

When Benito Mussolini founded, on March 23, 1919, the organization that would become the National Fascist Party, Italy’s top newspaper relegated the news to a blurb, roughly the same space devoted to the theft of 64 cases of soap. That’s where Antonio Scurati’s novel M: Son of the Century starts.

“Powerlands”: Young Diné Filmmaker on Indigenous Resistance to Resource Colonization Worldwide

We continue our Earth Day special by looking at how Indigenous peoples are protecting the Earth. We follow the journey of Ivey Camille Manybeads Tso, an award-winning queer Navajo filmmaker whose new film “Powerlands” shows how corporations like Peabody, the world’s largest private coal company, have devastated her homeland. She also connects with Indigenous communities in Colombia, the Philippines, Mexico and Standing Rock facing the same struggle.