Today's Liberal News

Why Trump Won’t ‘Produce a Scalp’ After the Signal Debacle

In the telling of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, he was only executing his duties when he shared plans about a forthcoming attack on Yemen in an unclassified group chat on the Signal messaging app. “My job,” he told reporters during a swing through Hawaii, “is to provide updates in real time.”
The implication: Nothing to see here.

Independent Agencies Never Stood a Chance Under Trump

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.
Updated at 5:37 p.m. ET on March 27, 2025
“What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence” in the federal government “and seize them,” Russ Vought told The New York Times in 2023. As the Trump administration’s first two months prove, he wasn’t bluffing.

The NIH’s Most Reckless Cuts Yet

By design, clinical trials ask their participants to take on risk. To develop new vaccines, drugs, or therapies, scientists first have to ask volunteers to try out those interventions, with no guarantee that they’ll work or be free of side effects. To minimize harm, researchers promise to care for and monitor participants through a trial’s end, long enough to collect the data necessary to determine if a therapy is effective and at what cost.

The Drink Americans Can’t Quit

A young woman is at a diner with friends, being stared down by a waitress with frosted lipstick and no time to waste. What she wants is a soda—but for whatever reason, she can’t bring herself to have one. Same with the girl at the pool party, and the one at the drive-through, and the one sitting in what looks like a sorority house, and the guy at the convenience store.

Susan Sontag’s Vision

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
Some of Susan Sontag’s photographs: Corpses of tortured Chinese rebels (“Five white men standing behind them,” she writes, “posing for the camera”). A woman whose right foot has been transplanted onto her left leg (“This is not a surgical miracle”). Her father in a Tianjin rickshaw, 1931 (“He looks pleased, boyish, shy, absent”).

Elon Musk’s Family History in South Africa Reveals Ties to Apartheid & Neo-Nazi Movements

Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Johannesburg, South Africa, and raised in a wealthy family under the country’s racist apartheid laws. Musk’s family history reveals ties to apartheid and neo-Nazi politics. We speak with Chris McGreal, reporter for The Guardian, to understand how Musk’s upbringing shaped his worldview, as well as that of his South African-raised colleague Peter Thiel, a right-wing billionaire who co-founded PayPal alongside Musk.

Can Elon Musk Buy Wisconsin? Ari Berman on Billionaire-Funded Attempt to Flip State Supreme Court

After spending over a quarter of a billion dollars on Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign, Elon Musk is pouring money into a Supreme Court election in Wisconsin. Musk has spent more than $18 million to support Trump-backed candidate Brad Schimel over liberal Susan Crawford and has been paying Wisconsin voters $100 to help flip the state’s top court.

“Kidnapped”: 1,000+ Protest After Masked ICE Agents Abduct Tufts Ph.D. Student Rumeysa Ozturk

Over a thousand protesters gathered near Tufts University on Wednesday after masked plainclothes immigration agents snatched Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts Ph.D. student and Fulbright scholar, from the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts. Surveillance video shows agents approaching her on the streets near her home Tuesday evening and handcuffing her while she screamed for help. Tufts University’s president said the school had no prior notice of her arrest.