Today's Liberal News

Is AI Art a ‘Toy’ or a ‘Weapon’?

Editor’s Note: This article is part of our coverage of The Atlantic Festival. Learn more and watch festival sessions here.
Earlier this year, the technology company OpenAI released a program called DALL-E 2, which uses artificial intelligence to transform text into visual art. People enter prompts (“plasticine nerd working on a 1980s computer”) and the software returns images that showcase humanlike vision and execution, veer into the bizarre, and might even tease creativity.

Geek Wars

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.Pop-culture franchises such as Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones—which grew this year to include Amazon’s The Rings of Power and HBO’s House of the Dragon, respectively—have recently begun diversifying their casts.

The New Kabul

The streets are silent. Women and schoolgirls are completely covered, if they are seen at all. Food is scarce for many. But it was not always like this in Bushra Seddique’s home. Before she fled Afghanistan, before the Taliban returned just over a year ago, Seddique had days and nights in cafés with friends, a job as a journalist, and a full life in bustling Kabul.Seddique’s escape from Afghanistan happened as abruptly as the United States’ withdrawal from her country.

The Glory of Feeling Fine

A few months ago, I got food poisoning. The sequence of events that led to my downfall began with a carton of discounted grocery-store sushi purchased and consumed on a Thursday, which led to me waking up a little queasy on a Friday, which devolved into a 12-hour stretch of me vomiting and holding myself in a fetal position, until my legs ached from dehydration.

What Is Harry Styles Doing in Don’t Worry Darling?

The world of Don’t Worry Darling is picture-perfect at a glance: a company town called Victory, California, where a bunch of mid-century-modern homes have magically sprouted in the desert. Imagine someone opened a Mad Men theme park in Palm Springs, with the men outfitted in skinny ties and horn-rimmed glasses, and the women in glitzy dresses keeping everyone’s martinis fresh.

“Model America”: Family of Phillip Pannell, Killed by White NJ Cop in ’90, Still Struggles for Justice

A new series examines how protests that erupted over a police killing three decades ago offer important lessons for the Black Lives Matter movement today. We speak to the family of Phillip Pannell, a 16-year-old Black boy who was fatally shot in the back in 1990 by a white police officer later acquitted for the killing. Pannell is the subject of “Model America,” a new four-part series by MSNBC that looks at the racial divide in the U.S.

Ukraine update: Ukraine reportedly breaks Russian lines east of Oskil River

Considering how the last couple of days have brought Vladimir Putin calling for partial mobilization in Russia, President Joe Biden blasting Russia in the U.N. for significant violations of the charter, and a big prisoner swap that saw many Azovstal defenders and U.S. POWs returned in exchange for an oligarch and some captured Russian agents, it’s understandable that the last few updates haven’t gotten far into the nitty-gritty of events on the down.

Donald Trump claims he declassified documents ‘by thinking about it,’ but that’s not the worst thing

Telepathy is the ability to communicate using only thoughts. Telekinesis is the ability to move objects with the mind. But Donald Trump believes he has an ability even more rare and unbelievable—teledeclassification, the ability to declassify Top Secret documents without saying a word to anyone.

In a Wednesday appearance with Sean Hannity, Trump denied that there had to be a process for declassification. No forms, no verification, not even any words.

U.S. Supreme Court approval plummets to record lows as court expansion gains majority support

What’s a lot more popular with voters than the Supreme Court? The right to have an abortion. That’s the finding of two national surveys from the Marquette University Law School Poll released Wednesday and Thursday.

Marquette finds that the Supreme Court’s approval has plummeted in the past two years from 66% approval in September 2020 to 40% this month. That means just 40% of adults approve of the job the U.S. Supreme Court is doing.