Today's Liberal News

New Jersey: Images of the Garden State

New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the nation, with 8.9 million residents living in the fourth-smallest state in the U.S. From the Skylands, to the Palisades, to the farms and cranberry bogs, and down the Jersey Shore to Cape May, here are a few glimpses of the landscape of New Jersey and some of the wildlife and people calling it home.This photo story is part of Fifty, a collection of images from each of the United States.

‘This Push to Open Schools Is Guaranteed to Fail’

In March, we were all living in 15-day increments. Working from home and distance learning, for those who had the terrible luxury of such things, would be a weeks-long affair, surreal but temporary. Fifteen days to flatten the curve. Fifteen days to slow the spread.Scientists warned us even then that a return to normalcy would take longer, but the telescoped timeline had obvious appeal. You can put up with almost anything for just 15 days.

The Best American Novelist Whose Name You May Not Know

In the winter of 1975, a quiet young woman from Lexington, Kentucky, met her Ph.D. adviser in Brown University’s writing program for a series of unsatisfactory tutorials about an ambitious project of hers that had yet to fully reveal itself. The encounters were strange enough that her adviser still recalled them in an interview a quarter century later: “I was doing all the talking, and she would sit rigidly, just bobbing her head in a regal manner.

Michael Jones Receives Royal Honors

Over the years, I’ve frequently mentioned my friend Michael Jones, a computer scientist and geography whiz. Nine years ago, he was a leading figure in my Atlantic story “Hacked,” the saga of what my wife Deb and I learned when her email account was taken over by international hackers. For an Atlantic column around the same time, I interviewed him on the way omnipresent, always-available mapping was likely to change people’s habits and lives.

When a Family Separation Becomes Permanent

On a Friday morning in April 2019, a guard at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Aurora, Colorado, entered a cell occupied by Idrissa Camara, a 31-year-old immigrant from West Africa, and informed him that he had a visitor. Camara wasn’t expecting anyone, but figured it might be his wife, Arri Woodson-Camara. Typically, detainees are allowed to speak with visitors only through a pane of glass in a narrow visiting room.

Barack Obama: Honor John Lewis by Renewing Voting Rights Act & Ballot Access in the U.S.

In his stirring eulogy at the funeral service for Congressmember John Lewis, President Barack Obama said expanded voting rights would be the greatest way to honor the civil rights icon’s legacy. In a speech that condemned the status of American democracy without ever naming the sitting president, Obama called for election day to be declared a national holiday, full Congressional representation for Washington, D.C.

Rev. James Lawson: John Lewis’s Life Is Call to Action Against U.S. Violence & Plantation Capitalism

As mourners gathered at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to honor the life of Georgia Congressmember John Lewis, among those who spoke was civil rights icon Rev. James Lawson, who helped to train John Lewis in nonviolence when Lewis was a student in Nashville. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once described Rev. Lawson as “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.” Lawson invoked John Lewis’s life as a call to action.

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.