Today's Liberal News

The Constitution Is Perfectly Clear About Citizenship

It took all of about 39 seconds for the vicious “birther” chatter to reemerge once former Vice President Joe Biden announced that Senator Kamala Harris would be his running mate for the November election. No wonder, since a certain variety of American citizen just can’t seem to wrap his mind around the U.S. Constitution’s provisions guaranteeing equal citizenship to all Americans.

The Plan That Could Give Us Our Lives Back

Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here. Michael Mina is a professor of epidemiology at Harvard, where he studies the diagnostic testing of infectious diseases. He has watched, with disgust and disbelief, as the United States has struggled for months to obtain enough tests to fight the coronavirus.

Just How Far Will Trump Go?

President Donald Trump’s open admission yesterday that he’s sabotaging the Postal Service to improve his election prospects crystallizes a much larger dynamic: He’s waging an unprecedented campaign to weaponize virtually every component of the federal government to partisan advantage.

Jail Took My Mom: Filmmaker on How His Mother Broke the Cycle of Incarceration & Shaping DNC Policy

The coronavirus crisis and the movement for racial justice have magnified the challenges faced by people released from prison, whose criminal record makes it hard to find a job and even housing, especially women. We feature a new AJ+ series by Messiah Rhodes, whose mother was in and out of jail throughout his childhood and was able to break the cycle of incarceration. Rhodes says his work serves as a response to calls to defund police.

Rashid Khalidi: Israel & UAE Deal to Normalize Relations Is New Chapter in 100-Year War on Palestine

In a deal brokered by the United States, Israel and the United Arab Emirates have agreed to fully normalize relations after years of secretly working together on countering Iran and other issues. Under the deal, Israel has also agreed to temporarily halt plans to annex occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank, which had already been on hold due to international condemnation.

What Lovecraft Country Gets Wrong About Racial Horror

Eli Joshua Ade / HBOLike many young people, the protagonist of the 2016 novel Lovecraft Country devours entertainment that his father finds foolish and reprehensible. Atticus loves reading science fiction, fantasy, and horror—genres that, as his dad points out, are dominated by white authors and full of racist stereotypes. The tension inherent in Atticus’s fondness for such writers drives much of Lovecraft Country, which is set in the 1950s.

Kanye West, Political Pawn

To teach someone is to influence them, and nothing interests Kanye West more than influence. (Shutterstock / Getty / Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic)Underlying Kanye West’s confusing run for president may be the simple impulse that has driven much of his career: the impulse to teach. His first album, 2004’s The College Dropout, kicked off with a skit in which West was asked to give a school’s commencement speech.

What the Nazis Learned from Jim Crow: Author Isabel Wilkerson on the U.S. Racial Caste System

In her extensively researched new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson argues the United States’ racial hierarchy should be thought of as a caste system, similar to that in India. In a wide-ranging interview, she describes how she also looks at the ways Nazi Germany borrowed from U.S. Jim Crow laws. “The Nazis needed no one to teach them how to hate,” Wilkerson says.

Photos of the Week: Antarctic Sunrise, Suspended Cabin, Shanghai Lightning

Heavy fog in India, the announcement of a Vice Presidential candidate in Delaware, protests and anger in Beirut, coronavirus precautions in a Thai kindergarten, a Latvian folk/pagan metal band in concert, a funicular in Austria, a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, derecho damage in Iowa, guests at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the return of the Mayflower II, and much more.

‘Ms. Jacobs! Is that you?!’ AOC’s Twitter reunion with her second-grade teacher is whole tear-fest

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez learned Wednesday she would only be given one minute to speak at next week’s virtual Democratic National Convention, she tweeted the poem “I have only just a minute,” written by late civil rights leader Dr. Benjamin E. Mays. That tweet attracted a bit of unexpected attention.  

The attention was paid by her second-grade teacher, who goes by @mjacobs324 on Twitter.