Today's Liberal News

Mueller reminds us that Roger Stone is still a convicted felon, no matter what Trump tweets

Donald Trump rewards loyalty, sometimes, when he feels like it, and convicted felon Roger Stone is the most recent beneficiary of the Racist in Chief’s inconsistent and conditional generosity. Disgust at Trump’s commutation of Stone’s federal sentence (before the latter served a day of his 40 months) has been widespread since the move was announced late Friday, even if surprise is a bit harder to find.

The Threat to American Democracy That Has Nothing to Do With Trump

In the summer of 1945, for 17 days, the newspaper deliverers of New York City went on strike. As hundreds of thousands of city residents found themselves temporarily deprived of their daily papers, the behavioral scientist Bernard Berelson saw an opportunity: He wanted to understand what it felt like for people to suddenly lose their primary sources of news. So he set about interviewing them.

Stone Walks Free in One of the Greatest Scandals in American History

Roger Stone’s best trick was always his upper-class-twit wardrobe. He seemed such a farcical character, such a Klaxon-alarm-from-a-mile-away goofball—who could take him seriously?Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen: They had tradecraft. They didn’t troll people on Instagram or blab to reporters. They behaved in the way you would expect of people betraying their country: conscious of the magnitude of their acts, determined to avoid the limelight.

The Deep South’s Only Democratic Senator Still Has Hope

When Doug Jones invokes the civil-rights movement of the early 1960s, he knows the stakes. Forty years before his upset win in a 2017 special election to represent Alabama in the Senate, Jones, a U.S. attorney, prosecuted Klansmen for the Birmingham church bombing—and insisted that the guilty verdict not be seen as the end of the movement’s story.Jones understands why Americans might be cynical about the current civil-rights protests.

Mazars Is a Victory for Rule of Law

The Supreme Court knows how to go out with a bang. On Thursday, the justices closed the (virtual) courthouse doors for the summer after finally releasing two long-awaited rulings on President Trump’s efforts to block the release of his financial information to prosecutors and Congress.

China’s Xinjiang Policy: Less About Births, More About Control

For years, when I was giving talks or discussing my reporting on China’s one-child policy, well-meaning audience members would inevitably ask a question that I had come to expect: “Of course forced abortions and sterilizations are bad,” they would say, “but isn’t the one-child policy good, in some ways? Doesn’t it help lift millions of people out of poverty?”This has always been the Chinese Communist Party’s narrative.