Today's Liberal News

A Pandemic Guide to Anime: New hits (and a few misses)

Welcome back, happy holidays, and so forth. Still bored and stuck at home? Good, keep doing that. Until there’s enough vaccine for everybody, everybody needs to plant themselves at home as much as possible. Read a book. Play some games. Watch television.

If you’ve gone through everything your television has to offer and come up empty, you’re welcome to join us for our quick tour of the best of anime. (See: Part 1, Part 2.

Diet culture loves New Year’s Day, but you can opt-out of faux food morality at any time

While it can feel like thinking back to March is like thinking back about 100 years, it was, in fact, less than a year ago. If you were in the United States, we probably all experienced something relatively similar—debates on whether or not to buy or make our own masks (or wear them at all), how much food to stock up on, if you’d be working from home for a long time (if at all), and, somehow, how not to gain weight. Yes.

Strangest of All: A podcast of true fiction, and false facts

Over the Christmas holiday, I decided to try my hand at the podcasting game. Thanks to a microphone delivered by Santa and the ease with which all the little tools can be acquired these days, I sat down for a day and got something that sounds like … an amateur who sat down for a day. Still, I enjoyed the process and it gave me a chance to talk about something that has obsessed me for more than half a century: the books of former radio host Frank Edwards.

Biden’s Secret Service detail to include trusted agents as allies express ‘concerns’ about others

The Washington Post is reporting that there are going to be some changes to the Secret Service’s presidential security detail in the Joe Biden administration. This is not unusual in itself, but the Post says the changes come “amid concerns from Biden allies that some current members were politically aligned with President Trump.”

This is an unpleasant story in every direction. It may be unfairly maligning professionals in a deadly dangerous job.

Colonization Fueled Ebola: Dr. Paul Farmer on “Fevers, Feuds & Diamonds” & Lessons from West Africa

We continue our conversation with medical anthropologist Dr. Paul Farmer, whose new book, “Fevers, Feuds, and Diamonds,” tells the story of his efforts to fight Ebola in 2014 and how the history of slavery, colonialism and violence in West Africa exacerbated the outbreak. “Care for Ebola is not rocket science,” says Dr. Farmer, who notes that doctors know how to treat sick patients.

Dr. Paul Farmer: Centuries of Inequality in the U.S. Laid Groundwork for Pandemic Devastation

As the United States sets records for COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations, we speak with one of the world’s leading experts on infectious diseases, Dr. Paul Farmer, who says the devastating death toll in the U.S. reflects decades of underinvestment in public health and centuries of social inequality. “All the social pathologies of our nation come to the fore during epidemics,” says Dr.

People’s Vaccine: Calls Grow for Equal Access to Coronavirus Vaccine as Rich Countries Hoard Supply

While the United States, Britain and other wealthy countries race to vaccinate their populations against the coronavirus, a new report finds that as much as 90% of the population in dozens of poorer countries could be forced to wait until at least 2022 because wealthy countries are hoarding so much of the vaccine supply. A growing movement is calling for the development of a people’s vaccine and the suspension of intellectual property rights to expand access. We speak with Dr.

The Dark Reality of Betting Against QAnon

QAnon—the conspiracy theory that elite Democrats, government officials, and celebrities are part of a cannibalistic, child-sex-trafficking cult, and Donald Trump is the hero destined to stop them—has allegedly inspired kidnappings, car chases, and a murder. It has also made 28-year-old Patrick Cage a lot of money.In 2018, Cage, a Californian who works in international environmental policy, discovered a gambling platform called PredictIt.

Is America Still the ‘Shining City on a Hill’?

A shining city on a hill. Ronald Reagan loved the phrase. He used it over and over again, perhaps most notably in his 1989 presidential farewell address.
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it.