Today's Liberal News

AI’s Emerging Teen-Health Crisis

On Tuesday afternoon, three parents sat in a row before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism. Two of them had each recently lost a child to suicide; the third has a teenage son who, after cutting his arm in front of her and biting her, is undergoing residential treatment. All three blame generative AI for what has happened to their children.
They had come to testify on what appears to be an emerging health crisis in teens’ interactions with AI chatbots.

Mike Pence: Donald Trump Has Not ‘Changed the Republican Party’

In a conversation with Tim Alberta at The Atlantic Festival, former Vice President Mike Pence discussed his conservatism, the state of free speech on the right, and his relationship with President Donald Trump.
Alberta asked Pence about ABC’s decision last night to “indefinitely suspend” the comedian Jimmy Kimmel. The network’s move came after Kimmel said “the MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.

David Letterman’s Jimmy Kimmel Reaction: ‘We All See Where This Is Going, Correct?’

The 78-year-old comic legend David Letterman arrived onstage at The Atlantic Festival today carrying a list of presidents he’d mocked in his 33 years as the longest-running late-night comedy host in American history. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama—he’d made fun of them all (especially, he added with a chuckle, Clinton and Bush II).

MAHA fights back

Make America Healthy Again groups are planning rallies from coast to coast in defense of the health secretary after some lawmakers denounced him.

Amnesty Int’l: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Palantir Enable & Profit from Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

We speak with the secretary general of Amnesty International about the human rights group’s new report on the “global political economy enabling Israel’s genocide, occupation and apartheid” against Palestinians. Agnès Callamard says Israel’s “24 months of genocide” since October 2023 would not be possible without international support and the continued supplying of Israel’s war machine by major arms makers, technology firms and other companies. The report names the U.S.

The Running Mate Kamala Harris Didn’t Dare Choose

As Kamala Harris rushed to pick a running mate last year, her “first choice” was her close friend Pete Buttigieg, but she decided that it would be “too big of a risk” for a Black woman to run with a gay man.
Buttigieg “would have been an ideal partner—if I were a straight white man,” Harris writes in a passage of her soon-to-be-released book, 107 Days, that I saw. “But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man.

Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio: MAGA Has Figured Out How to ‘Play Dirty’

When Enrique Tarrio picked up the phone, the first thing he wanted me to know was that he was pushing through a four-day hangover. This was on Monday, and he had just returned to Miami from WestFest, an annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas in which Proud Boys from around the country gather for hard drinking and general debauchery, basically a “frat party,” he said.

The Fed Rate Cut Won’t Be Enough to Appease Trump

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The Federal Reserve finally cut interest rates today—but that’s not likely to stop the president’s pressure campaign against the central bank anytime soon.

Who to Trust If You Can’t Trust the CDC

Americans across the political spectrum are aligned on at least one belief, albeit for different reasons: The CDC is a mess. In a poll conducted this summer by The Washington Post and KFF, a nonpartisan health-policy organization, Democrats and Republicans alike expressed low confidence that the agency could be trusted to make independent decisions based on scientific fact. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The Last Americans Really Paying Taxes

Donald Trump is altering the tax code for the benefit of millionaires and billionaires. That is the simplest conclusion to draw from the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act earlier this summer, and not an incorrect one. Yet the bill also does something stranger and harder to parse, and something that might prove a more perilous threat to the country’s finances in the long term.