Today's Liberal News

A group of Harvard and MIT scientists are snorting an untested COVID-19 vaccine

Science, as it is done in in most laboratories around the world, advances by careful steps. Medical science in particular can involve months or years of theoretical models, in-vitro testing, and animal trials before first first pill, procedure, or needle approaches a human being. But there’s another kind of science. The kind practiced by people who maybe empathized a little too closely with Robert Heinlein characters a little too closely in their youth.

Indian Matchmaking Exposes the Easy Acceptance of Caste

This story contains some spoilers for Season 1 of Indian Matchmaking.“Marriages are breaking like biscuits.”The Mumbai-based matchmaker Sima Taparia delivers this meme-friendly one-liner in the seventh episode of the hit Netflix series Indian Matchmaking. Her sentiment seems antithetical to the title of the show, in which she travels tirelessly between Mumbai, Houston, San Diego, and Delhi to find the “perfect match” for her clients.

How Poetry Can Guide Us Through Trauma

In her foundational 1977 essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” the Black feminist writer Audre Lorde argued that the art form transcends the constraints of the written word. Poetry doesn’t just reflect the world as it exists, she insisted; rather, it ushers in a new one. “It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action,” Lorde wrote.

Colleges Are Deeply Unequal Workplaces

As colleges unveil their reopening plans for the fall, concerns about the safety of faculty teaching in classrooms populated with young adults have taken center stage. But largely left out of the conversation have been the people actually getting campuses up and running: the staff.Over the past few months, the pandemic has exposed long-standing fissures in the campus workplace. Faculty and staff occupy two very different worlds—a chasm like few others in the American economy.

An Ode to Balloons

Tim LahanThere are balloons, and then there are balloons.There’s the domestic balloon, over which we shall quickly pass—the sad little sphere that you blow up at home, with your own laborious, why-am-I-doing-this carbon dioxide. A lot of pathos, for whatever reason, attaches to this balloon.Then there is the irrepressible balloon, the balloon pumped taut with cartoon levity. A balloon of this sort is essentially an arrested impulse. A trapped prayer, if you like.

The Problem With the ‘Judeo-Christian Tradition’

Last week, the State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights issued its draft report on the global status of human rights. The report, which resulted from a year of cerebral discussions with a carefully curated set of scholars and activists, brought the conversation back to where it started: an impassioned celebration of religious freedom as the most important human right.

Chomsky on Israel’s Hindering of Palestinian Pandemic Response & Threat to Annex Occupied West Bank

Noam Chomsky says Israel’s planned annexation of the occupied West Bank “basically formalizes” what has already been official policy over the last half-century, from both left-wing and right-wing parties in Israel. He compares Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to anti-immigrant policies in the United States, and says the main goal of annexation is to take over as much territory while excluding its Palestinian inhabitants.

GOP congressman reprimanded for 11 ethics violations, including fake loan he made to his campaign

Republican Rep. David Schweikert agreed to pay a $50,000 fine, accept a formal reprimand, and admit to 11 different violations of congressional rules and campaign finance laws in a deal with the bipartisan House Ethics Committee to conclude its two-year-long investigation of the congressman. But while the matter may now officially be closed, Schweikert’s already uncertain political future is now only more endangered.