Today's Liberal News

Don’t Call It a Global Banking Crisis

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.The near-collapse of the global banking behemoth Credit Suisse, shortly following two high-profile American bank failures, complicates regulators’ efforts to restore confidence in the banking system. It’s also stoking fears of a contagion effect across the financial sector worldwide.

The Rise of Gender-Neutral Names Isn’t What It Seems

Baby names just aren’t what they used to be. You can see it these days in all the little Blakes and Emersons and Phoenixes and Robins—and if you can’t immediately tell whether I’m talking about boy or girl names, then ah, yes, that’s exactly it. When it comes to baby naming, we’re at peak androgyny.

A Major Clue to COVID’s Origins Is Just Out of Reach

Updated at 2:45 p.m. on March 21, 2023
Last week, the ongoing debate about COVID-19’s origins acquired a new plot twist. A French evolutionary biologist stumbled across a trove of genetic sequences extracted from swabs collected from surfaces at a wet market in Wuhan, China, shortly after the pandemic began; she and an international team of colleagues downloaded the data in hopes of understanding who—or what—might have ferried the virus into the venue.

Is This the Singularity for Standardized Tests?

Last fall, when generative AI abruptly started turning out competent high-school- and college-level writing, some educators saw it as an opportunity. Perhaps it was time, at last, to dispose of the five-paragraph essay, among other bad teaching practices that have lingered for generations. Universities and colleges convened emergency town halls before winter terms began to discuss how large language models might reshape their work, for better and worse.

Woke Is Just Another Word for Liberal

The conservative writer Bethany Mandel, a co-author of a new book attacking “wokeness” as “a new version of leftism that is aimed at your child,” recently froze up on a cable news program when asked by an interviewer how she defines woke, the term her book is about.On the one hand, any of us with a public-facing job could have a similar moment of disassociation on live television. On the other hand, the moment and the debate it sparked revealed something important.

War Made Easy: Norman Solomon on How Mainstream Media Helped Pave Way for U.S. Invasion of Iraq

As we continue to mark the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, we look at how the corporate U.S. media helped pave the way for war by uncritically amplifying lies and misrepresentations from the Bush administration while silencing voices of dissent. Longtime media critic Norman Solomon says many of the same media personalities and news outlets that pushed aggressively for the invasion then are now helping to solidify an elite consensus around the Ukraine war.

Remembering Mozambican Rapper Azagaia: Police Crack Down on Protests After Death of Cultural Icon

We speak with Dipti Bhatnagar, climate justice activist based in Mozambique, about the recent death on March 9 of the popular rapper and cultural icon Azagaia. He was just 38 years old. He inspired many with his music and sang about injustice, including mistreatment of people by the authorities, as well as about poverty and social injustice. Azagaia’s death has sparked protests in Mozambique which authorities have violently suppressed.

U.N. Warns “Climate Time Bomb Is Ticking” as Cyclone Freddy Death Toll Tops 560 in Malawi & Mozambique

In a major new report released Monday, the United Nations is calling for immediate and drastic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in order to stop global warming. The “final warning” by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change comes as the death toll from Cyclone Freddy just swept through southeast Africa, killing hundreds of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more.

Blood and Treasure: Documenting the Costs of Iraq War from Civilian Casualties to Trillions Spent

With the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 20, we speak with Oxford University international relations professor Neta Crawford, who says the region is still reeling from the impact of the war. “The story continues. It’s not over,” she says. Crawford is co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, where her latest report pegs the cost of U.S. wars in Iraq and Syria since 2003 at nearly $2.9 trillion. Since the U.S.

Julian Assange’s Father & Brother Speak Out on His Jailing, Press Freedom & New Documentary “Ithaka”

We continue our coverage of the 20th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq by looking at the imprisonment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been jailed for exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. One video released by WikiLeaks showed a U.S. helicopter gunship in Baghdad slaughtering a dozen civilians, including a Reuters journalist. Assange has been held in London’s Belmarsh prison since 2019 as he fights the U.S.

Never Again: Human Rights Groups & Japanese Americans Warn Biden Against Jailing Migrant Families

This week nearly 400 human rights groups urged the Biden administration not to revive the controversial practice of migrant family detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Biden ended family detention when he took office two years ago but is now reportedly reconsidering it as part of a wider crackdown as his administration prepares to phase out the contested Trump-era Title 42 pandemic policy used to expel over 2 million migrants without due process at the southern border.

I Supported the Invasion of Iraq

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.Twenty years after the United States led a coalition to overthrow Saddam Hussein, the conventional wisdom is now that the postwar fiasco proved that the war was a mistake from its inception. The war, as it was executed, was indeed a disaster, but there was ample cause for launching it.

12 Readers on the Question of Cars

This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.I held off on asking a new question of the week last Wednesday so I could share more of your reflections on cars. Below are the remainder of your thoughtful replies.