Today's Liberal News

What You’re Saying When You Give Someone the Silent Treatment

Kipling Williams has studied the effects of the silent treatment for more than 36 years, meeting hundreds of victims and perpetrators in the process:A grown woman whose father refused to speak with her for six months at a time as punishment throughout her life. “Her father died during one of those dreaded periods,” Williams told me. “When she visited him at the hospital shortly before his death, he turned away from her and wouldn’t break his silence even to say goodbye.

Listen: A History of Pandemic Xenophobia and Racism

The recent shootings in Atlanta highlighted a surge of anti-Asian violence in the United States throughout the pandemic. Disease stigma and racism have together shaped pandemic response and policy for centuries.And so to better understand this history, on the podcast Social Distance, co-hosts James Hamblin and Maeve Higgins speak with Alexandre White, a sociologist and medical historian at Johns Hopkins University.

In House hearing on extremism, Republican reveals he’s been duped by military version of ‘The Onion’

Most of us don’t think Bill Gates has uploaded Windows Vista into the COVID-19 vaccine, and we won’t give credence to inanities burped out by semi-ambulatory heaps of knob cheese who listen to demon sperm doctors instead of world-renowned infectious disease experts. Why? Because we’re astute consumers of media.

But Republicans, by and large, are not.

Dr. Rachel Levine makes history—and makes a promise to support and advocate for transgender youth

On Wednesday, the U.S. Senate voted 52-48 to confirm Dr. Rachel Levine, an openly transgender pediatrician, as assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health and Human Services. Levine, who previously served as Pennslyvania’s secretary of health, is the first openly transgender federal official confirmed by the Senate, as reported by NPR. In other words, Levine quite literally made history.

After a year of misinformation, Fox News senior employee dies of COVID-19 at the age of 52

Maria Bartiromo’s Fox News gig has been a long march into the bottom of an ocean awash in fearmongering, bigotry, and misinformation. Like most Fox News programming this past year, Bartiromo’s programs have been showcases for easily debunked conspiracy theories, all racist and anti-China by nature. 

On Monday, CNN reported Eric Spinato, a senior Fox News employee who’d been with the network for 20 years, died from COVID-19 complications.

What Biden’s First Press Conference Revealed

Joe Biden has a reputation as a softie—grandfatherly if you’re inclined toward him, somewhat windy and elderly if you aren’t. But when he reached for a phrase to define his approach to office during his first press conference, held today, he didn’t pick an Irish poet or an American statesman. Instead, he quoted the hardheaded Teutonic conservative known as the “Iron Chancellor”: “Politics is the art of the possible,” Biden said.

The Big, Stuck Boat Is Glorious

Yesterday, with only a few minutes left in my weekly Zoom appointment with my therapist, I decided to derail the proceedings to ask her what I believed was an essential question. It had nothing to do with my fear of vulnerability or difficulty asking for help; in fact, it had nothing to do with me at all.