Today's Liberal News

The 14 Movies to Look Out for This Fall

The Princess Bride. The Shawshank Redemption. Almost Famous. Over the course of its 51-year history, the Toronto International Film Festival has hosted notable films of all genres and styles. The 2026 edition, which concluded in mid-September, curated movies from rising talent and established filmmakers alike, including a modern-day Nigerian-set remake of Mrs.

I’m Calling for a Pause in the Development of the Universal Bone Dissolver

Allow me to introduce myself. For the past nine years, I have been the leader of a small, advanced company that is generally unknown to the public but of some renown within my field. We are one of the many teams of engineers working to develop what most people call (somewhat inexactly) the Universal Bone Dissolver.
It sounds like a frightening idea, I know. Science fiction has certainly taught us to be wary of a machine with the power to dissolve all human bones.

What Trump Misunderstands About Modern Media

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
As modern American journalism began taking shape before the Civil War and newspapers were entering the world at staggering rates, the novelist Cornelius Mathews wondered at what point the profusion should stop, or whether it should stop at all.

Pete Hegseth, Idea Guy

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.
Pete Hegseth seems to imagine himself as a man of big ideas. Perhaps you’ve worked with someone like that: Every organization has “idea hamsters,” who spin in their wheels and toss out suggestions of wildly varying quality.

“Berlin 4” Lawyer on Pro-Palestine Protest Crackdown & Germany’s Unconditional Support for Israel

Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman is in Berlin, Germany, this week, where the crackdown on pro-Palestine speech is shaped by the German policy of Staatsräson, or “reason of state.” The concept refers to Germany’s commitment to the existence of the Israeli state in light of the Holocaust. Since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza in 2023, Staatsräson has manifested itself as German military aid to Israel and heavy policing of Palestine activism inside Germany.

Afghans “Have Been the Victims” of U.S. Military, Taliban, Cartels & More for Decades: Nagieb Khaja

Award-winning Danish Afghan journalist and filmmaker Nagieb Khaja’s most recent documentary, Winning Heart and Minds, is an investigation into what went wrong in the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan. In the film, Khaja travels to Musa Qala, the capital of the southern Helmand province. Danish and British troops had been deployed to Musa Qala in 2006 to defend their allies, the local police, against Taliban insurgents.
While urban areas benefited from U.S.

“Buying More Time for the Genocide”: Muhammad Shehada on Trump’s Gaza Plan 1 Year Later

The Palestinian death toll from Israel’s war on Gaza has surpassed 74,000, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. While this figure represents the official death toll as confirmed by local authorities, the true number could be much higher when missing people and indirect deaths are taken into account, such as from disease, exposure, denial of medical treatment and the destruction of civic infrastructure.

A Near-Disaster on Flydubai

Today, somewhere over Saudi Arabia, the co-pilot of an Israel-bound Flydubai Boeing 737 stabbed the other pilot and pitched the nose of the plane toward the desert below. The jet descended 17,000 feet in two minutes, at an acceleration violent enough to make your phone and in-flight snack jump off your tray and be pinned to the ceiling. Other crew members and at least one Israeli passenger broke into the cockpit and subdued the assailant.

MAHA Gone Mild

The Make America Healthy Again movement has always had a split personality. Many of the movement’s leaders are fervent anti-vaccine activists whose views are at odds with scientific evidence and out of step with most Americans. At the same time, MAHA’s tenets include eating more vegetables and getting enough sleep, which is perfectly reasonable advice; it’s just hard to take seriously from people who, like Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., wax nostalgic about catching measles.

Pete Hegseth’s Magic Marker

The supersize black Sharpie is what gives it away. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s order to stop awarding tenure to civilian professors at the military academies ends with a huge, jagged signature—an homage, perhaps, to that of the president—the size of two of the paragraphs above. With the same instrument, he also underlined, word by word, two key sentences that are as blunt as the message they are intended to deliver and the mind that conceived them.