Today's Liberal News

The Pandemic Made Her Sick, Even Before She Caught COVID-19

In the summer of 2009, when Diana was three and a half years old, her health took a tumble. She began to run high fevers and vomit, and gain weight at a baffling pace. She made several trips to the emergency room over the course of two months before doctors finally diagnosed her with two rare, life-threatening conditions. The first, atypical hemolytic uremic syndrome, went after her kidneys, “and really messed them up,” Diana told me.

Tucker Carlson, Unmasked

Social media has so conditioned people to expect hyperbole that there’s a perverse satisfaction when a clip is truly as bad as advertised. Last night, a viral tweet claimed that Fox News’s Tucker Carlson had told his audience to harass people on the street wearing masks—and to “call the police immediately; contact child protective services” if they saw a child wearing one.Surely, this couldn’t be a fair description; naturally, it was.

Artificial Intelligence Is Misreading Human Emotion

At a remote outpost in the mountainous highlands of Papua New Guinea, a young American psychologist named Paul Ekman arrived with a collection of flash cards and a new theory. It was 1967, and Ekman had heard that the Fore people of Okapa were so isolated from the wider world that they would be his ideal test subjects.Like Western researchers before him, Ekman had come to Papua New Guinea to extract data from the indigenous community.

It’s Not Vaccine Hesitancy. It’s COVID-19 Denialism.

Several years ago, two sociologists researched whether Americans were willing to take a novel vaccine during a pandemic. Taking poll data from the midst of the 2009 H1N1 swine-flu outbreak, they broke out hesitancy by race, age, and partisanship, among other factors.

“A Warrant Is Not a License to Kill”: Rev. William Barber Condemns Police “Execution” of Andrew Brown

Hundreds of demonstrators have taken to the streets of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, to protest the police killing of Andrew Brown Jr., a 42-year-old Black father shot dead in his car on April 21. On Monday, authorities allowed Brown’s family and attorney to watch a 20-second video clip of the shooting. The family says it shows Brown was shot in the back of the head while his hands were on the steering wheel of a car, calling it an “execution.