Today's Liberal News

“The Great Escape”: Saket Soni on Forced Immigrant Labor Used to Clean Up Climate Disasters in U.S.

As the rate of climate-fueled disasters intensifies, we speak with author and organizer Saket Soni about the workers who are hired by corporations to clean up after hurricanes, floods, blizzards and wildfires. Soni’s new book, “The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America,” focuses on hundreds of Indian workers who were brought to the United States with false promises and subjected to grueling working conditions at a shipyard in Mississippi.

Ralph Nader on Saving Social Security, Fighting Corporate Crime, Worker Deaths & Launching Newspaper

In an in-depth interview with longtime consumer advocate Ralph Nader, we look at Republican-led efforts to gut Medicare and Social Security amid debt limit talks, backed by some Democrats, and other proposed cuts to the social safety net, as well as corporate greed and watchdog journalism. Nader also discusses his newly launched newspaper, the Capitol Hill Citizen.

Banned by Putin: Editor at Russian Outlet Meduza on Censorship, Eroding Freedoms & Ending Ukraine War

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is in Brussels today to address the European Union Parliament. The visit comes after he made surprise trips to Paris and London where he urged European nations to begin providing Ukraine with fighter jets and long-range weapons. Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has repeated his call for the war to end.

“Continuous Insanity”: Syrian Dissident Yassin al-Haj Saleh on 12 Years of War & Earthquake Relief

As the death toll tops 17,000 in Turkey and Syria from Monday’s twin earthquakes, we look at the situation in Syria, where 12 years of brutal war have left the country’s institutions in tatters, further complicating aid efforts. Syrian writer, dissident and former political prisoner Yassin al-Haj Saleh describes how the war has killed about 2% of Syrians and displaced 7 million more, or about a third of the population.

America Has Gone Too Far in Legalizing Vice

“The cause of a gambling problem is the individual’s inability to control the gambling.” So says the National Council on Problem Gambling, an organization funded by the gambling industry to help people who have become addicted to its products. This attitude—that anyone who falls into gambling addiction has only themselves to blame—has allowed state lawmakers to ignore arguments that more access to gambling might make it easier for people to lose control.

Why We Lose Our Friends as We Age

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.When I was in college, an acquaintance who had graduated a few years prior came back to visit for the weekend. As we walked around campus on Saturday night, he flung his hands into the cold Connecticut air and exclaimed, “You guys are so lucky; you live a minute away from all your friends.

Attachment Style Isn’t Destiny

The panic set in at the same point every semester: Whenever Ximena Arriaga, a psychology professor at Purdue University, got to attachment theory in her course on close relationships, the classroom grew tense. When she described how people who are anxiously attached can sometimes be demanding and vigilant—and that can drive their partners away—certain students looked disturbed. “I could just see in their face: I’m so screwed,” Arriaga told me.

The Quiet Desperation of Tom Brady

A few years ago, I asked Tom Brady if he ever worried that too much of his life was consumed by the game of football. This was, in retrospect, kind of a duh question to put to someone who played, you know, the game of football for a living. Rather successfully, too, and for a long time.Brady confirmed the question’s premise that, yes, football meant pretty much everything to him and he could not imagine doing anything else with himself.

The Case for a Four-Day Workweek in Maryland

The Maryland State Capitol building is older than America. It is the only state capitol to have also served as the nation’s capital; in the country’s earliest days, Congress met in its chambers. To work in Annapolis is to operate in the shadow of history. So maybe that explains why, 246 years into the American project, one state lawmaker sees his four-day-workweek bill as carrying on in the tradition of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.