Today's Liberal News

Six Books for People Who Love Movies

Watching a film in a theater, free of smartphones, sunlight, and other distractions, can be a hypnotic experience. When the lights go down and the smell of popcorn fills your nose; when the sound roars from the back and an imagined universe is literally projected before you; when multiple sensory inputs braid themselves together to create a potent whole, you might lose yourself in the best possible way.

November Will Be Worse

Last week, Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted a map on X to show Hurricane Helene’s path overlapping with majority-Republican areas in the South. She followed it up with an explanation: “Yes they can control the weather.”
Greene was using they as a choose-your-own-adventure word, allowing her followers to replace the pronoun with their own despised group: the federal government, perhaps, or liberal elites, or Democrats.

“Catastrophic Category 5”: Report from West Florida on Hurricane Milton as Millions Evacuate

We get a live report from downtown Gulfport, Florida, as the state braces for the impact of historic storm Milton, which is expected to make landfall at “catastrophic” strength. News director Seán Kinane of WMNF community radio describes heavy rain and significant debris remaining from Hurricane Helene, which battered the region less than two weeks ago to become the deadliest hurricane to strike the continental United States since Hurricane Katrina.

Motaz Azaiza, Acclaimed Journalist from Gaza, on Photographing War & Making “Art from the Pain”

“I never expected the world will know my name [because of] a genocide of my people,” says Palestinian photojournalist Motaz Azaiza, who gained international acclaim for his work during the first 108 days of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. Since evacuating in January, Azaiza has brought his advocacy for Palestinian rights around the world. Democracy Now! speaks to him from Washington, D.C.

“The First Live-Streamed Genocide”: Al Jazeera Exposes War Crimes Filmed by Israeli Troops Themselves

A new documentary from Al Jazeera takes a look at evidence of war crimes in Gaza in the form of social media posted by Israeli soldiers recording and celebrating their own attacks on Palestinians. We play excerpts from the film Investigating War Crimes in Gaza, now available online, and speak to two of the journalists involved in its production, director Richard Sanders and Gaza-based correspondent Youmna ElSayed.

Report from Beirut: Israel Intensifies Bombardment of Lebanon, Displacing 1.2 Million

Today marks both the first anniversary of the October 7 attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip and one week since Israel began its ground invasion of the neighboring country of Lebanon. Israel’s brutal military response to the Hamas-led October 7 incursion has shown no sign of slowing down as the United States, its primary supplier of military aid, continues to commit weapons, funding and rhetorical support to its deadly assault on Arab populations in Gaza, the West Bank and now Lebanon.

Why Trump and Harris Are Turning to Podcasts

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.
Kamala Harris is in the midst of a media blitz this week, including an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes yesterday evening and an appearance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert tonight.

A Nobel Prize for Artificial Intelligence

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.
The list of Nobel laureates reads like a collection of humanity’s greatest treasures: Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Francis Crick, Toni Morrison. As of this morning, it also includes two physicists whose research, in the 1980s, laid the foundations for modern artificial intelligence.

Women Can Be Autocrats, Too

Mexico has sworn in its first woman president. This looks like a bold step for equality and progress—all the more impressive because the new president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, is of Jewish origin. Her father’s parents immigrated to Mexico from Lithuania in the 1920s; her mother’s parents escaped to Mexico from Axis-aligned Bulgaria in the early 1940s.
But Mexico is not advancing toward an egalitarian future. It is regressing into an authoritarian past.

AI’s Penicillin and X-Ray Moment

When the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel wrote his will in 1895, he designated funds to reward those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.” The resulting Nobel Prizes have since been awarded to the discoverers of penicillin, X-rays, and the structure of DNA—and, as of today, to two scientists who, decades ago, laid the foundations for modern artificial intelligence.

Ta-Nehisi Coates: I Was Told Palestine Was Complicated. Visiting Revealed a Simple, Brutal Truth

As the war on Gaza enters its second year and Israel expands its attacks on Lebanon, we continue our conversation with the acclaimed writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. His new book, The Message, is based in part on his visit last year to Israel and the occupied West Bank, where he says he saw a system of segregation and oppression reminiscent of Jim Crow in the United States. “It was revelatory,” says Coates.

“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 new 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.