Today's Liberal News

Israel’s “Killing Machine”: How U.S. Military Support Is Undercutting Ceasefire Talks, Prolonging War

As Israel continues its relentless bombardment and siege of Gaza, where hunger and dehydration have reached deadly levels, Hamas has accused Israel of “thwarting” efforts to reach a ceasefire deal. A Hamas delegation in Cairo said that Israel has insisted on rejecting elements of a deal for a phased process that would culminate in an end to Israel’s assault on Gaza, as well as ensuring the entry of aid and facilitating the return of displaced Palestinians back to their homes in Gaza.

“The Zone of Interest”: Oscar-Nominated Film Producer on the Holocaust, Gaza & “Walls That Separate Us”

Ahead of the 96th Academy Awards, we’re joined by James Wilson, producer of the Oscar-nominated film The Zone of Interest, who raised Israel’s assault on Gaza in his BAFTA Award acceptance speech last month. The film follows the fictionalized family of real-life Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss as they live idyllically next to the Auschwitz concentration camp.

America’s False Virus Equivalence

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.
This month marks four years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. My colleague Katherine J. Wu recently published an article about what is driving the U.S. government to frame COVID-19 as being flu-like—and the problems with that approach.

A Looming Disaster at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant

This article is based on interviews and research by the Reckoning Project, a multinational group of journalists and lawyers collecting evidence of war crimes in Ukraine.
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, in the city of Enerhodar, in eastern Ukraine, is Europe’s largest nuclear facility. For decades, it has supplied electricity to millions of households, not just in Ukraine, but in Hungary, Poland, Belarus, Moldova, Slovakia, and Romania as well.

Pfizer Couldn’t Pay for Marketing This Good

On June 3, 2021, a roughly 60-year-old man in the riverside city of Magdeburg, Germany, received his first COVID vaccine. He opted for Johnson & Johnson’s shot, popular at that point because unlike Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines, it was one-and-done. But that, evidently, was not what he had in mind. The following month, he got the AstraZeneca vaccine. The month after that, he doubled up on AstraZeneca and added a Pfizer for good measure.

The Lifeblood of the AI Boom

Artificial intelligence can appear to be many different things—a whole host of programs with seemingly little common ground. Sometimes AI is a conversation partner, an illustrator, a math tutor, a facial-recognition tool. But in every incarnation, it is always, always a machine, demanding almost unfathomable amounts of data and energy to function.
AI systems such as ChatGPT operate out of buildings stuffed with silicon computer chips.

The 2024 U.S. Presidential Race: A Cheat Sheet

Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.
No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.
But that didn’t prevent a crowded primary.

What I Witnessed in Gaza Is a Holocaust: Palestinian Writer Susan Abulhawa

We speak with Palestinian novelist, poet and activist Susan Abulhawa, who is in Cairo and just returned from two weeks in Gaza. “What’s happening to people isn’t just this death and dismemberment and hunger. It is a total denigration of their personhood, of their whole society,” says Abulhawa. “What I witnessed personally in Rafah and some of the middle areas is incomprehensible, and I will call it a holocaust — and I don’t use that word lightly. But it is absolutely that.

CDC loosens Covid isolation guidance

The guidance for Covid now aligns with RSV and the flu and comes amid a marked decrease in Covid-related hospitalizations and deaths, and as many people tell officials they don’t bother to test when ill.