Today's Liberal News

The Joy of Voting

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.Americans sometimes forget that voting is not only a right and a duty, but an experience that can make us feel better about our communities and system of government.But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Cats Give the Laws of Physics a Biiiiig Stretch

In October of 1894, at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, the renowned physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey showed a series of photographs that sent his colleagues into collective uproar. In the flurry of accounts that followed, one conference attendee proclaimed that Marey had presented a scientific paradox that violated the fundamental laws of how objects moved.At the center of the controversy was a cat. Specifically, a dropped cat that had, in midair, twisted to land on its feet.

How to Keep Your Book Club From Becoming a Wine Club

Imagine this familiar scenario: A book club has decided to meet at an appointed time and place. A host has lit candles, set wine and cheese on a table, arranged chairs in a circle, and put on background music. The guests arrive, maybe holding hardcovers with stiff spines or library-laminated dust jackets. The room fills with chatter as attendees grab their glasses and sit. Then there’s some silence, some twiddling of thumbs, some sipping.

Julian Aguon: U.S. Militarization of Guam Is “Nothing Less Than Cataclysmic”

The geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China is reshaping life in the U.S. territory of Guam, where the already-massive military presence is set to expand as the Pentagon builds up its capabilities in the Pacific. “We are directly in the line of fire,” says Julian Aguon, a CHamoru writer and human rights lawyer, who describes the build-up of U.S. troops and military infrastructure on Guam as “nothing less than cataclysmic” for the Indigenous people.

A Very California Lesson on Just How Weird Electricity Is

Last week, Americans had a rare view into what the future might look like. It came from California, as usual, but it was not courtesy of Apple’s annual keynote, or indeed of any technology company. It came from the state’s electricity grid.Wait—wait! Don’t click away yet. Electricity is, I hasten to add, extremely interesting. It is the energy source of the future.

‘The Cure for Burnout Is Not Self-Care’

The first thing you need to know about quiet quitting is that it’s not actually quitting. Instead, the quitter keeps their job and chooses to do only the bare minimum rather than go above and beyond. The second thing you need to know is that the term is brand new, so everyone is still figuring out the rest. To cite the Oxford English Dictionary of our very online times, Google searches for quiet quitting were basically nonexistent until this past August.But now it’s everywhere.

The Emmy Speech That Showed the Power of Live TV

Nothing against all of the other Emmy winners tonight, but even the most perfectly rehearsed, elegantly delivered acceptance speech couldn’t possibly compare to Sheryl Lee Ralph’s moment in the spotlight. In the minutes after the actor won Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series, she sang and beamed and soliloquized, inspiring the audience to leap to their feet again and again—and again.

It’s official: Trump won’t be invited to the Queen’s funeral

Queen Elizabeth II appeared to despise former President Donald Trump when she was essentially required to entertain him along with the former First Lady, but decorum prevailed. In death, all bets are off. According to statements from Windsor Palace, only current dignitaries have been invited to the United Kingdom for the Queen’s send-off.

Trump has bragged that meeting  Queen Elizabeth II was “the most extraordinary honor of [his] life.

Trump legal filing suggests all those top secret documents were just his personal records

Donald Trump’s lawyers on Monday asked Judge Aileen Cannon to continue blocking the Justice Department from reviewing the classified documents the FBI recovered from Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s lawyers’ filing is predictably filled with errors of fact and logic and law, but Cannon, a Trump appointee, has already shown that she doesn’t really care about that—she’s going to rule as she wants, regardless of the facts of the matter.