Today's Liberal News

Dusty Pillars

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Joseph DePasquale, Alyssa Pagan
Day 25 of the 2025 Space Telescope Advent Calendar: Dusty Pillars. This is the James Webb Space Telescope’s mid-infrared view of the Pillars of Creation, trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, about 7,000 light-years away. The mid-infrared view allows scientists to focus on the dense dust in the star-forming regions within these massive pillars.
See the full advent calendar here.

A Tribute to Blacklisted Lyricist Yip Harburg: The Man Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz

His name might not be familiar to many, but his songs are sung by millions around the world. Today, we take a journey through the life and work of Yip Harburg, the Broadway lyricist who wrote such hits as “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and who put the music into The Wizard of Oz, the movie that inspired the hit Broadway musical and now Hollywood blockbuster, Wicked.

Watching Someone Fail Shouldn’t Be So Fun

Marty Mauser cannot stop the hustle. In Marty Supreme’s electrifying opening moments, the audience is introduced to the wiry 20-something (played by Timothée Chalamet) in 1950s New York. He’s working as a shoe salesman, talking a fussy older customer into buying a fancier brand with easy confidence. Almost immediately thereafter, we learn that his boss (who happens to be his uncle) wants to make him the store manager. But Marty, a working-class Jewish kid, won’t hear of it.

Is Victor Wembanyama Too Tall?

In middle age, some sports fans become reactionaries. Due to dwindling neuroplasticity, or some general souring toward the world, they can no longer appreciate how a game evolves. It’s similar to when a music fan stops checking for new artists and plays only albums that they loved in high school. As an aging NBA fan, I’m trying to stay vigilant. I never want to catch myself ranting endlessly at the bar about the inferiority of younger stars.

Netflix vs. Paramount

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If Warner Bros. Discovery was only a movie house, it would have had one of its best years ever. Two of its films (One Battle After Another and Sinners) are front-runners for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and it had a string of critical hits and box-office successes with Superman, Weapons, and A Minecraft Movie.

“Out for Blood”: Writer Jasper Nathaniel on Surviving Israeli Settler Attack on W. Bank Olive Farmers

We speak to independent journalist Jasper Nathaniel, who has recently returned from documenting Israeli settler and state violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. Nathaniel describes being ambushed by settlers in October, on the first day of the olive harvest, in an attack that left one middle-aged Palestinian woman with a brain hemorrhage. “It was clear that this was a planned ambush,” says Nathaniel. “They were out for blood.

So This Is Why Trump Didn’t Want to Release the Epstein Files

Nearly two years ago, Donald Trump kicked off the presidential-campaign season with a declaration: “I was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island,” he posted on Truth Social in January 2024. Reports to the contrary, he insisted, were the fault of AI—and of his political rivals: “This is what the Democrats do to their Republican Opponent, who is leading them, by a lot, in the Polls.

An Idiosyncratic Christmas Playlist

This is an edition of  The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Christmas has always made me nostalgic, but I have come to realize, with something of a jolt— perhaps because I just turned 65—that my sense of nostalgia is not what it used to be.