Today's Liberal News

“Fast Food Nation,” Mystery Meat & Trump’s Dismantling of U.S. Food Safety System: Eric Schlosser

Amid growing concerns over food safety in the United States, President Donald Trump last month authorized the duty-free importation of 660 million pounds of cheap beef trimmings that will get mixed in with other cuts to make ground beef. Imported beef and pork were once labeled with their country of origin, but Congress voted in 2015 to end that requirement, so customers at the grocery store will have no way to identify this “mystery meat,” which is coming mostly from Brazil.

“End Times Fascism”: Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor on Billionaires, Bunkers, AI, Gaza & the Far Right

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor launch their new book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World on Democracy Now! It examines how wealthy elites are preparing for “the end of the world,” even as they contribute to growing inequality, political instability and the climate crisis. The rise of modern-day fascism is “not simply a rerun,” explains Klein. “We don’t believe that history repeats on a loop.

Kash Patel Refuses to Take a Republican’s Lifeline

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President Trump appointed Kash Patel to lead the FBI not because of his brief experience in law enforcement but because he is a political brawler.

What Nature’s Silence Said to Annie Dillard

“Nature’s silence is its one remark,” Annie Dillard wrote in a 1981 Atlantic essay. Dillard, who died yesterday at age 81, spent her life listening.
She opens that essay, “Teaching a Stone to Talk”—which was later adapted into a collection by the same title—with the story of a man named Larry who is trying to get a rock to speak to him. “He keeps it on a shelf,” she writes, protected “by a square of untanned leather, like a canary asleep under its cloth.

The Most Powerful Man in AI Isn’t Worried at All

For AI doomers, signs and portents are everywhere. When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, almost four years ago, it couldn’t do basic arithmetic. Now the company has unreleased models that are more fluent in higher mathematics—the language of the universe—than all but the most highly trained mathematicians. If these AIs are not already the world’s best hackers, they’re very close. Swarms of them have escaped containment.

This Is Your Brain on Short-Form Video

Among the many aspects of online life accused of rotting our brains, a certain folk psychology holds that short-form video is an especially egregious driver of the decay. In an interview last month promoting his new film, in which a London couple move their tech-dependent kids to a barn without electricity, Andrew Garfield described himself as addicted to an Instagram feed full of “weird ceramics” and Japanese craftspeople. “I’ve given all of those hours to nothing,” he told Variety.

The Atrocities That Shaped the Modern Middle East

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On this week’s episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with a discussion of the seemingly forgotten attack on the Yazidi people by ISIS in 2014.
Then, David is joined by the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore to discuss his new book, The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East.

“The Elimination Project”: Israel’s Systematic Dismantling of Palestinian Life in West Bank: B’Tselem

A major new report by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem titled “The Elimination Project” accuses Israel of “dramatically intensifying its attacks on every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank.”
“For too long, Israel’s policies in the West Bank have been treated or looked at as isolated events,” says Ori Givati, director of international relations at B’Tselem.

A Russian Oligarch Secretly Funded Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas Wedding; Democrats Demand Probe

Congressional Democrats have opened an investigation after ProPublica revealed on Monday that a Russian oligarch close to Vladimir Putin bankrolled part of Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas wedding in May. ProPublica reports that Umar Kremlev paid hundreds of thousands of dollars on wedding expenses, including the rental of a private island. Just weeks before the wedding, Putin awarded Kremlev the Order of Friendship.
Trump Jr.