Today's Liberal News

This holiday season, give Santa some time off

Whether you celebrate a religious holiday or not, the winter season often involves some form of gift-giving. Perhaps that’s within your immediate or extended family, coworkers, or friends. Whether you have your own children or not, people often give gifts to kids.

A Fantasy-Football League Unafraid to Commit to the Bit

Each installment of The Friendship Files features a conversation between The Atlantic’s Julie Beck and two or more friends, exploring the history and significance of their relationship.This week she talks with five representatives of a 12-person fantasy-football league called Raccoon Nation. Their commitment to the league has led to an elaborate infrastructure of regulations and statistics, a trophy for the winners, punishments for the losers, and even merch.

The Books Briefing: How to Tell the Story of a Family

The poet Marianne Moore had a deeply close—perhaps too close—relationship with her mother, Mary. This idiosyncratic bond intrigued Moore’s contemporaries and her biographer Linda Leavell, who trains her eye on it in Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore.

A Horror Movie Where Wealth Is the Demon

In The Nest, a family moves into an English mansion in the countryside filled with opulent rooms, creaky staircases, and secret passages. The setup is familiar for a horror film: A happy couple buys a mysterious property and discovers, upon arrival, that something is terribly wrong with the house. The movie, directed by Sean Durkin, opens with appropriate portentousness, a discordant piano score clanging over the title card.

Four Days in Occupied Western Sahara — A Rare Look Inside Africa’s Last Colony as Ceasefire Ends

In this special rebroadcast of a Democracy Now! exclusive documentary, we break the media blockade and go to occupied Western Sahara in the northwest of Africa to document the decades-long Sahrawi struggle for freedom and Morocco’s violent crackdown. Morocco has occupied the territory since 1975 in defiance of the United Nations and the international community. Thousands have been tortured, imprisoned, killed and disappeared while resisting the Moroccan occupation.

Dry Ice Is Hotter Than Ever

At 4:30 a.m. on the Monday before Thanksgiving, the dry-ice manufacturing floor at Noble Gas Solutions in Albany, New York, was hopping. The machine that compresses carbon-dioxide gas into dry ice was cranking out pellets of the stuff—1,500 pounds an hour—and Noble’s staff was racing to fill hundreds of bags so that a mission-critical product could be distributed on an unforgiving deadline.The product: cheesecake.The deadline: Thanksgiving dinner.

The Damage Will Last

“The guardrails of our system actually worked,” the political analyst Amy Walter marveled on Monday evening, capturing how many reacted to the Trump administration initiating a formal transition of power to the Biden administration. American democracy had survived its weeks-long brush with disaster, despite President Donald Trump’s baseless fraud claims, surreal press conferences, and shaky legal challenges.

Indigenous Groups Vow to Keep Resisting as Construction Is Approved for Enbridge Tar Sands Pipeline

A massive fight is brewing in Minnesota against the Enbridge Line 3 pipeline after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers approved a permit for the project this week. After years of resistance, pipeline construction is now set to begin by the end of the month despite the concerns of Indigenous communities, who say it would violate tribal sovereignty and contaminate the land and water.