Today's Liberal News

Poll finds 40% of Americans who get their news from OANN believe in devil-worshipping conspiracy

When I was a younger man, I would walk through the store and laugh as the tabloids featured stories about “Bat Boy” and “Devil Child,” or stories about Bill Clinton being a secret alien, Ronald Reagan having been cloned, or George Bush Sr. conducting his own military runs in planes during the Gulf War. The Weekly World News and all the garbage fodder of the time period represented a more laid back era when people would laugh at the madness.

Podcast: It’s Time to Tango

Now that Jim’s “Quite Possibly Wonderful Summer” is coming to fruition, a lot of listeners have been considering the present and future. Can you go to a tango festival? What should parents be watching for? And why, exactly, is the surgeon general wearing that uniform? Hit play for answers and a short history lesson from Ruth Fairbanks, a listener and history professor, in conversation with hosts James Hamblin and Maeve Higgins.

What Breakthrough Infections Can Tell Us

With 165 million people and counting inoculated in the United States, vaccines have, at long last, tamped the pandemic’s blaze down to a relative smolder in this part of the world. But the protection that vaccines offer is more like a coat of flame retardant than an impenetrable firewall. SARS-CoV-2 can, very rarely, still set up shop in people who are more than two weeks out from their last COVID-19 shot.These rare breakthroughs, as I’ve written before, are no cause for alarm.

All the Sad, Lonely Pandemic Puppies

Bowen the goldendoodle is never home alone. When he first came home as a puppy, last June, his parents were working remotely because of the pandemic. If they try to leave their Boston apartment for even a few minutes now, he makes his unhappiness audible. “He’s whining and barking, and we just don’t want to upset the neighbors,” Jon Canario told me. So they don’t. Wherever they go, he goes. Wherever he can’t go, they don’t go.

Dr. Monica Gandhi on the Origins of COVID-19, Vaccine Equity, the Debate over Masks & More

President Joe Biden has ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to investigate the origins of COVID-19 as new questions are being raised over whether an accidental leak from a Chinese virology lab is to blame for the pandemic. The Wall Street Journal reports three employees of the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill with COVID-like symptoms in the autumn of 2019 and were hospitalized in November of that year, before the first recorded case of COVID-19.

No Tokyo Olympics: As COVID Spikes in Japan, Calls Grow to Cancel Games. IOC Refuses. Who Profits?

Pressure is growing on organizers to cancel the Tokyo Olympics as Japan struggles to contain a fourth wave of COVID-19 cases. The games, which were delayed by a year due to the pandemic, are scheduled to begin July 23 even though less than 3% of the Japanese population has been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, one of the lowest rates in the developed world. Jules Boykoff, author and former Olympic athlete who played for the U.S.