Today's Liberal News

The Lie at the Heart of the Western

Anne Rearick / Agence vu / ReduxA gentleman comes from the East Coast to make his fortune. When the train lets him off in a dusty Wyoming town, he encounters an array of cowpunchers, card sharps, and ne’er-do-wells, whose coarse manners shock and intrigue him. At the saloon, he’s treated to their opinions on the local women, as well as one man’s boast that he never forgets a face—so long as that face is white.

Against the Parts of Me That Think They Know Anything

They want to put out the light of God with their mouths—want, like the sovereignty of the dead, extending just short of flesh. Theirtoday is broken, they suggest tomorrow, who right now is dancing in the sun withputty over his eyes. Like an ocean coughing up trash, I’m squeezing Godout from my pores, intention throbbing like a moon. Which ofthe jokes I told was best—the difference between man and light?Light won’t ask for your tongue. Good joke, the taste of lemon.

America Didn’t Need Sports After All

The night that sports began shutting down was the night that the United States began shutting down. On March 11, 2020, an announcer at the Oklahoma City Thunder’s home arena told fans just before tip-off that the evening’s game had been postponed. Within an hour, the visiting Utah Jazz revealed that a player—soon identified as the center Rudy Gobert—had tested positive for COVID-19, and the NBA also declared that it was indefinitely suspending the season.

The Surprising Key to Combatting Vaccine Refusal

Why wouldn’t someone want a COVID-19 vaccine?Staring at the raw numbers, it doesn’t seem like a hard choice. Thousands of people are dying of COVID-19 every day. Meanwhile, out of the 75,000 people who received a shot in the vaccine trials from Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax, zero died and none were hospitalized after four weeks.

The Sports League That Refuses to Court Certain Fans

The National Women’s Hockey League is just six years old, has only six teams, and, like many women’s professional sports leagues, has faced slow early growth. The players are part-time, often competing only on the weekends, and the salaries are small—just $7,500 a year on average. Their games are broadcast on Twitch, an online streaming platform usually used for video games. And the coronavirus pandemic ended last year’s season early.

‘If masks and social distancing don’t work, then what the hell happened to the flu?’

Though my spot on the introversion spectrum lies somewhere between Kleenex box-wearing Howard Hughes and urine-collecting Howard Hughes (and as I continue to age, I’m on a bullet train to raw-fish-eating Gollum), I still usually get sick in the winter at least once.

In the past, while grocery shopping or taking in a matinee movie, I’d occasionally run into someone I know.

California is releasing nearly $30 million to aid asylum-seekers recently allowed into U.S.

California is releasing tens of millions in funds to assist newly arrived asylum-seekers with food and transportation as they travel to sponsors, the Associated Press reports. The $28 million will go to San Diego Rapid Response Network member Jewish Family Service, and comes as the Biden administration is allowing into the U.S. a number of families blocked by the previous administration’s anti-asylum policy.

Here’s what you need to know about the water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi

Between the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the recent storms and subsequent power and heat outages in Texas, and the seemingly endless hate spewing out of members of the GOP, it can be hard to keep track of stories that don’t always get the national media attention they deserve. One such case is a water crisis happening in Jackson, Mississippi. As reported by The Daily Beast at the end of February, thousands of people living in Jackson had been without water for almost two weeks.