Today's Liberal News

This Is the Hurricane Season El Niño Foretold

For more than four months, since this hurricane season began, the Atlantic has been eerily placid—a remarkable stretch without a single hurricane. That prolonged calm has been rudely interrupted by Hurricane Isaias, a Category 3 fastball that is bearing down on the Gulf Coast and is expected to make landfall this evening near the Alabama-Florida line.

Public Execution Won’t Have the Effect Trump Intends

Before the mid-19th century, executions in America were presumptively public. Most prisoners were hanged on a gallows, following an hours-long affair that began with the condemned person’s exit from jail accompanied by ministers, the sheriff and his deputies, and sometimes a military escort. Spectators joined the humiliating procession, gathering by the thousands to watch the noose lowered over the prisoner’s neck.

The Real Harm of a Public Execution

Yesterday, in an interview aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the United States would soon carry out its first public execution since the 1930s. “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it,” he said. Pentagon officials later confirmed that the execution will be livestreamed. The condemned man is former Major Nidal Hasan, who shouted “God is great” in Arabic before murdering 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009.

Whatever Happened to Friday Night?

The week has a heartbeat, and its rhythm is changing.
When Neal Caren, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recently dug into data from the American Time Use Survey to look at when people were hanging with their friends over the course of a week, he mapped out a pattern that reminded him of an EKG. He saw steady pulses of friend time every weekday evening after work hours, and then bigger spikes on Friday and Saturday nights—like an arrhythmia caused by having fun.

Anne Carson’s View of the Past

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The literature of ancient Greece and Rome seems to be in vogue. This summer, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey turned Homer’s epic poems into best sellers, and yesterday the Nobel Prize was awarded to Anne Carson, a poet who has made a career of repurposing ancient-Greek works.

“Entire System of Cornell University Failed Her”: Jane Doe Gang Rape Case Enrages Campus Community

University students across the United States held a national day of action in solidarity with “Jane Doe,” the anonymous former student whose lawsuit alleging she was gang-raped by seven Cornell University Chi Phi fraternity members in 2024 has reignited outrage over how campuses and local law enforcement mishandle sexual assault cases and fail survivors.

Navi Pillay, South African Jurist, Wins Nobel Peace Prize in “Stinging Rebuke to Donald Trump”

The 2026 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, the South African jurist who led the United Nations commission of inquiry that concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. Pillay’s long career in international human rights law includes work as a defense attorney for anti-apartheid activists, president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, a former judge at the International Criminal Court and the U.N.

“Abolish ICE”: Protests Erupt in NYC After ICE Agents Shoot Father with 5-Year-Old Son in Car

Protests have erupted in New York City after a federal immigration agent shot and wounded a man in the Bronx on Thursday afternoon. As masked agents reportedly posing as construction workers attempted to arrest 28-year-old Oscar Belgal, they opened fire on his car. Belgal was shot in the neck. His 5-year-old child, who was in the back seat, was physically unharmed.

Three Years into Genocide, “The IDF Is Still Hunting Gazans”: Palestinian Journalist Akram al-Satarri

In Gaza, October 7, 2023, is viewed as the beginning of the genocide. Over the past three years, Israel killed over 74,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, but many believe that number is a vast undercount. The killing continues despite a so-called ceasefire that took effect about a year ago.
“Every single aspect of the life of the people of Gaza has changed once and forever,” since October 7, says Akram al-Satarri, a Gaza-based journalist.

‘Nothing About This Was Inevitable’

The second floor of OpenAI’s old headquarters had a theme. Each room was named after one of the most important inventions in human history: “Clock,” “Fire,” and, of course, “AGI,” or artificial general intelligence. I saw this in the spring of 2024, when I was interviewing some of the company’s researchers about recent technical advances. At the time, ChatGPT was still making embarrassing arithmetic errors, and the notion that the bot would ever rival human intelligence was dubious.

Trump’s Team of Mercenaries

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Kimberly Guilfoyle was so close to getting it right.
The Trump hanger-on—former fiancée to Don Jr. and the current ambassador to Greece—was exchanging messages with a man named Eric Deters, according to a bombshell Wall Street Journal story last night.

Anne Carson’s Seductive Strangeness

Anne Carson, who won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature today, doesn’t write masterpieces or door-stoppers, and she has no interest in emulating the great works of the past—including those of past laureates. Despite her training as a classicist and her celebrated skill as a translator, she would likely have little to say about the authenticity of film adaptations of The Odyssey.