Today's Liberal News

Biden’s Tarnished Legacy

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.
President Joe Biden still imagines that he could have won. Asked by USA Today’s Susan Page whether he could have beaten Donald Trump if he had stayed in the race, Biden responded: “It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes.”
Reality thinks not.

Trump Doesn’t Believe Anything. That’s Why He Wins.

Last week, President-Elect Donald Trump nominated Morgan Ortagus, a longtime State Department official, to serve as a deputy special envoy for Middle East peace—and immediately undercut her. “Early on Morgan fought me for three years, but hopefully has learned her lesson,” Trump wrote when he announced her hire on Truth Social. “These things usually don’t work out, but she has strong Republican support, and I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for them.

September 5 Captures a Crisis Becoming Must-Watch TV

In the film September 5, the ABC Sports studio at the 1972 Munich Olympics seems like an uncomfortable space in which to work, let alone think. The control room is smoky, the air conditioner barely functions, and every piece of machinery generates a frustrating amount of background noise. Yet the producers and reporters inside are more than capable of focusing on their jobs as they put together engaging, daily live broadcasts of the Games.

You’re Going to Die. That’s a Good Thing.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.
Has anyone described the fear of dying more vividly than the 19th-century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy in The Death of Ivan Ilyich? In that novella, published in 1886, the protagonist lives the conventional, prosperous life of a Russian bourgeois.

When Poets Face Death

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

L.A. Fires Should Be a Climate Wake-Up Call: 5 Dead, 130K+ Evacuated in Uncontained “Apocalypse”

Raging wildfires continue to scorch communities across the Los Angeles area, killing at least five people, displacing about 100,000 more and destroying thousands of structures. With firefighters unable to contain much of the blaze, the toll is expected to rise. The wildfires that started Tuesday caught much of the city by surprise, quickly growing into one of the worst fire disasters in Los Angeles history.

Zuckerberg Goes “Full MAGA” as Meta Ends Fact-Checking in U.S. & Paves Way for More Hate Speech

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced major changes to what content is allowed on his company’s social media platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads, scrapping the system of independent fact-checkers in favor of “community notes” from volunteer users. Zuckerberg also loosened moderation rules around offensive speech, which will allow hateful content targeting women, LGBTQ people and other groups.

The Payoff of TV’s Most Awaited Crossover

On Abbott Elementary, celebrity sightings are as common as a back-to-school flu outbreak or drama with the PTA. The show’s Season 2 premiere kicked off with the spunky second-grade teacher Janine Teagues (played by Quinta Brunson) trying to surprise Abbott students with an appearance from “the only celebrity that matters”: Gritty, the internet-famous mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers.

‘I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This’

We knew to expect winds. When they came on Tuesday morning, sounding like a tsunami crashing over my family’s home in western Malibu, the utility company shut off our power. We knew the chance of fire was high.
I had arrived home for the holidays in early December, and had already been greeted by the Franklin Fire, which had burned the hills black. Now, when my dad and I went in search of electricity, a great plume of smoke was rising above those burned hills.

Fact-Checking Was Too Good for Facebook

Yesterday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would end fact-checking on its platform. In the process, a partnership with the network of third parties that has provided review and ratings of viral misinformation since 2016 will be terminated. To some observers, this news suggested that the company was abandoning the very idea of truth, and opening its gates to lies, perversions, and deception. But this is wrong: Those gates were never really closed.