Today's Liberal News

Why This Shutdown Is So Dangerous

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Every government shutdown is a game of a chicken between Democrats and Republicans, or sometimes between Congress and the White House. And every administration tries to use its power to squeeze opponents, moving around money to keep some programs running and closing others.

Today’s Atlantic Trivia: I Run, I Ran, Iran

Updated with new questions at 4:15 p.m. ET on November 7, 2025.
The 37-volume Naturalis Historia, written by the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, is the world’s earliest surviving encyclopedia. In the first century C.E., Pliny set out to collect the breadth of human knowledge, and millennia later, it’s still a great document for learning a little bit about everything. It has chapters on sugar, Germany, the rainbow, Cesarean births, the art of painting, and hypothetical antipodes.

Pop Culture Is Obsessed With Female Friendships

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books.
In Toni Morrison’s Sula, the title character and Nel are friends and enemies all at once: Nel envies and eventually hates Sula but, at the end of the novel, finds herself entirely bereft without her. In Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, Lila and Elena are united by their similarities in an unforgiving world, until their differences send them hurtling away from each other.

What the Left Still Doesn’t Get About Winning

Zohran Mamdani is an extraordinary political story: a generational political talent, an out-of-nowhere success, and—measured by the number of citizens he will soon govern—the most powerful elected democratic socialist in American history.
But his allies have tried to turn his victory into something different: a model for the national Democratic Party.

Remembering Peter Weiss: Legendary Human Rights Lawyer Dies at 99

The trailblazing human rights attorney Peter Weiss died November 3 at the age of 99. Weiss served on the board of the Center for Constitutional Rights for nearly five decades, where he worked to end South African apartheid and the Vietnam War, fought for nuclear disarmament and sought justice for victims of the U.S.-backed Contras in 1980s Nicaragua. He pioneered using the 1789 Alien Tort Statute in human rights cases. He also represented the family of U.S.

“The Fight Is Not Over”: LGBTQ Advocates Challenge Supreme Court’s Anti-Trans Passport Ruling

In an unsigned order on Thursday, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to require U.S. passports to list travelers’ sex assigned at birth, another blow to the rights of transgender, nonbinary and intersex people, who had been able to select sex markers aligning with their gender identity or to use a gender-neutral X. Thursday’s order is an interim ruling while the passport case makes its way through lower courts.

“Epic Night for Democrats”: Party Wins Races Across the U.S. in Voter Rebuke to Trump

We get an overview of how Democrats won big across the United States in Tuesday’s elections, with Daniel Nichanian, editor-in-chief of Bolts. Democratic Congressmember Mikie Sherrill won New Jersey’s governor’s race, and Abigail Spanberger flipped Virginia’s governorship. In California, voters approved a new congressional map that could help Democrats pick up five additional congressional seats in a move to counter Texas’s redistricting plan.

Just When It Looked Like the Shutdown Might End

In the hours before Democrats’ electoral victories Tuesday night, the end of the government shutdown seemed near. Several Democratic senators had spent the day quietly discussing a potential bipartisan settlement. Republican leaders had expressed confidence that once the “radical left” activists had their say at the polls, moderate lawmakers would have enough political cover to cave and reopen the government.

Trump’s Ozempic Deal Has a Major Flaw

Donald Trump was giddy. In the Oval Office today, the president announced that he had secured a deal to dramatically slash the price of obesity drugs. Soon, Wegovy and Zepbound will be sold on a new website—dubbed TrumpRx—for only about $250 a month, a fraction of their current retail price of more than $1,000. “Did I do a good job?” Trump asked the assembled reporters. “Do you think Biden could have done this? I don’t think so.