Today's Liberal News

The Kash Patel Principle

Trump has been releasing names of his nominees for the Cabinet and other senior posts in waves. He began with some relatively conventional choices, and then unloaded one bombshell after another, perhaps in an attempt to paralyze opposition in the Senate with a flood of bad nominees or to overwhelm the public’s already limited political attention span.

The Future of the Executive Branch

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Although how the country is going to change after Donald Trump takes office remains uncertain, it’s clear that he will be one of the most powerful—and emboldened—U.S. presidents.

How Humans Handle Housework

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In 2019, Sophie Knight reflected on the unusual way she and her husband tried to deal with the imbalance of time spent on home chores: He paid her for housework.

What Trump Doesn’t Understand About the Military

In 1783, George Washington faced a potential mutiny of the Army. Two years after Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Congress still hadn’t paid American servicemen and was repudiating promised pensions. Alexander Hamilton, then in Congress, encouraged soldiers to rebel, because he thought the pressure would lead Congress to approve the taxing authority he sought. Washington reproached Hamilton in a letter: An army is “a dangerous instrument to play with,” he wrote.

How a Strongman Made Himself Look Weak

For Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, strength is everything. At home, that means repressing minorities and co-opting the press. Abroad, it means responding to any criticism of New Delhi with anger—and even, it seems, with political assassinations on friendly soil.
On September 18, 2023, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau alleged that the Indian government had killed Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia over his useless push for Sikh separatism.

“The Message”: Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Power of Writing & Visiting Senegal, South Carolina, Palestine

We spend the hour with the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose book The Message features three essays tackling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, book bans and academic freedom, and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. The Message is written as a letter to Coates’s students at Howard University, where he is the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department.

Lakota Historian Nick Estes on Thanksgiving, Settler Colonialism & Continuing Indigenous Resistance

Lakota historian Nick Estes talks about the violent origins of Thanksgiving and his book Our History Is the Future. “This history … is a continuing history of genocide, of settler colonialism and, basically, the founding myths of this country,” says Estes, who is a co-founder of the Indigenous resistance group The Red Nation and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.

What Breaking Up Google’s Search Monopoly Could Do to AI

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Google is taken for granted as a dominant force in the generative-AI market—so it’s easy to forget that, in the initial frenzy following the release of ChatGPT, the search giant was caught flat-footed. The company raced to catch up with OpenAI, and its early models made some basic and highly publicized errors.

Imagine a Drug That Feels Like Tylenol and Works Like OxyContin

Doctors have long taken for granted a devil’s bargain: Relieving intense pain, such as that caused by surgery and traumatic injury, risks inducing the sort of pleasure that could leave patients addicted. Opioids are among the most powerful, if not the most powerful, pain medications ever known, but for many years they have been a source of staggering morbidity and mortality.