Today's Liberal News

What Comes Next for Air Travel

The list of air-travel fiascos this past year reads like a verse of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”: A chunk of plane fell off mid-flight. Boeing workers went on strike. A CrowdStrike software issue grounded thousands of planes worldwide. A major airline merger was blocked. Passengers were terribly unruly.

The Road Dogs of the American West

Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat
Drive far enough into Texas from the Louisiana border, and you’ll see the ground dry, the earth crumble into dust. Eventually, the photographer Bryan Schutmaat told me, the strip malls fade into the rearview mirror, the landscape opens, and the American West begins.
Schutmaat has long been fascinated by the West; as he toured with punk bands in his teens and early 20s, he felt himself drawn to the region and its open space.

Kendrick Lamar Makes His Point Clearer

Mid is a perfect bit of new slang for a culture in which quantity is crushing quality, in which you can stream endlessly and feel nothing. What’s also fitting is that the word has become a favorite diss in the rap world, the musical genre that has helped pioneer what mediocrity means today. To be clear: Hip-hop is our era’s most dynamic art form.

My Home Is a Horror of Unfinished Tasks

Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at dearjames@theatlantic.com.
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Dear James,
Unless there is money attached or a truly significant deadline (impending wedding, house sale, moving van arriving), I never seem to complete what I begin.

Thanksgiving Should Be in October

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You are so tired! I can tell because I’m tired too. In a couple of days, tens of millions of Americans will get on planes or trains or highways, crunching our limbs in godless ways for hours on end, worrying if we left the stove on or packed enough layers. We will fight the crowds, brave the chaos, pay the money. And then we will get to wherever we’re going, and we’ll eat.

“I Am Ready, Warden”: New Film on TX Death Row Prisoner John Ramirez Examines Redemption & Vengeance

We speak with journalist Keri Blakinger about a new documentary, I Am Ready, Warden, based partly on her reporting about death row prisoner John Henry Ramirez, who was sentenced to die for the 2004 murder of a convenience store clerk named Pablo Castro in Texas. While on death row, Ramirez became a devout Christian and sued for the right to have his pastor lay hands on him when he was ultimately executed in 2022.

Leonard Peltier: Amnesty Int’l Calls on Biden to Free Indigenous Leader “Before It’s Too Late”

With just weeks left in President Joe Biden’s term, we speak with Amnesty International USA executive director Paul O’Brien, who has written to the outgoing president urging him to “change course on critical human rights” before the end of his term in office. One of his key demands is for Biden to free Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, who has been imprisoned for decades and repeatedly denied parole.