Today's Liberal News

“The Message”: Ta-Nehisi Coates on the Power of Writing & Visiting Senegal, South Carolina, Palestine

We spend the hour with the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose book The Message features three essays tackling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, book bans and academic freedom, and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. The Message is written as a letter to Coates’s students at Howard University, where he is the Sterling Brown Endowed Chair in the English department.

Lakota Historian Nick Estes on Thanksgiving, Settler Colonialism & Continuing Indigenous Resistance

Lakota historian Nick Estes talks about the violent origins of Thanksgiving and his book Our History Is the Future. “This history … is a continuing history of genocide, of settler colonialism and, basically, the founding myths of this country,” says Estes, who is a co-founder of the Indigenous resistance group The Red Nation and a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe.

Biden’s Unpardonable Hypocrisy

When President Joe Biden was running for a second term as president, he repeatedly ruled out granting a pardon to his son Hunter, who has pleaded guilty to tax fraud and lying on a form to purchase a gun. “He was very clear, very upfront, obviously very definitive,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said of one of his many promises to this effect.
Biden professed a willingness to abide by the results of the justice system as a matter of principle.

Castle Rose

My friends all think their apartments
used to be brothels. I don’t think
any of them ever were, but it’s a fitting mythology
for an eerie, rundown place with the original mahoganies,
hex tiles, and claw-foots. Sex is a place for ghosts. Sex, cities,
specialty markets with vacant glass fish counters, gilded
wine bars shut with the dissipation of frivolity
that necessitates a gilded wine bar.
It’s the Fourth of July. The city is empty.
Stoplights change.

A Constitutional Crisis Greater Than Watergate

Updated at 10:17 a.m. ET on December 1, 2024
For more than four decades before Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the FBI director was a position above politics. A new president might choose a political ally as attorney general, but the FBI director was different. An FBI director appointed by Richard Nixon also served under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Carter’s choice remained on the job deep into Reagan’s second term, when Reagan moved him to head the CIA.

It’s Never Too Late to Learn an Instrument

The recorder used to be an instrument people wanted to hear. As a 1946 article in The Atlantic explained, it gets mentioned lovingly in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Milton’s Paradise Lost. One 17th-century English-navy leader wrote in his diary that it made the best sound he’d ever heard. The recorder was the instrument of kings and queens: Henry VIII had a collection of more than 70.