Today's Liberal News

The Reality My Medicaid Patients Face

The bus smashed into him last month, when he was crossing the street with his wheelchair. By the time he made it to the public hospital in California where I work as a doctor, two quarts of blood had hemorrhaged into one of his thighs, where a tender football-shaped bulge distorted the skin. He remembered his view of the windshield as the bus bore down, then, as he toppled, of the vehicle’s dirty underbelly. He was convinced he’d die.
He didn’t.

What Moving Your Body Can Mean

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Although exercise has clear benefits for both physical and mental health, for many people, “those are side effects of the aesthetic goal,” Xochitl Gonzalez wrote in 2023.

The AI Birthday Letter That Blew Me Away

In May, I asked Google’s chatbot, Gemini, to write a birthday letter to my best friend. Within seconds, it spat out the most impressive piece of AI writing I have ever encountered. Instead of reading as soulless, machine-generated text, the letter felt unnervingly like something I might’ve actually written. “You’re probably rolling your eyes,” the letter read, after a sentence that my friend would most definitely have rolled his eyes at.

An AI That Couldn’t Care Less About Humans

Decades of movies that explore the potential of machine consciousness—Blade Runner; Ex Machina; I, Robot; and many others—have tended to treat the arrival of said consciousness as a matter of course. Theirs are worlds in which society is able to sympathize with, and even socially accept, a true artificial intelligence. Recognizing AI’s presence as inevitable, of course, does not make it less anxiety inducing, either in fiction or in reality.

What Trump—And the U.S.—Can’t Understand About Air Strikes

When Donald Trump ordered air strikes on key Iranian nuclear-enrichment sites last month and immediately declared that the targets had been “completely and totally obliterated,” he was counting on a single display of overwhelming air power to accomplish a major strategic goal. Though initially hesitant to join Israel’s 10-day-old bombing campaign against Iran, the president came to believe that the United States could finish off Tehran’s nuclear ambitions all at once.

GOP Budget Bill Slashes Medicaid for Millions, Cuts Taxes for the Rich, Funds ICE at Historic Levels

As we broadcast, the House was soon set to vote on the so-called big, beautiful bill before the July 4 deadline imposed by President Trump. Should the House pass the legislation, the bill would be sent to Trump’s desk to be signed into law. The bill massively increases funding for ICE, cuts $1 trillion from Medicaid over a decade and adds $3.3 trillion to the nation’s debt.

EXCLUSIVE: Mahmoud Khalil, Palestinian Activist Jailed by ICE for 104 Days, in First Live Interview

In his first live broadcast interview since being released from ICE detention, Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil tells Democracy Now! about his experience behind bars, the ongoing threat of deportation that hangs over him and why he continues to speak out against the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Gaza. The Columbia University graduate was the first pro-Palestinian campus protester to be jailed by the Trump administration.

A Red Sprite Gives Astronauts an Incredible Light Show

Nichole Ayers / NASA
Earlier this week, the NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers captured an amazing image of a sprite, a rarely photographed weather phenomenon, as the International Space Station passed above a storm over Mexico. Ayers wrote: “Sprites are TLEs, or Transient Luminous Events, that happen above the clouds and are triggered by intense electrical activity in the thunderstorms below.

America Is Killing Its Chance to Find Alien Life

In April, scientists announced that they had used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to find a potential signature of alien life in the glow of a distant planet. Other scientists were quick to challenge the details of the claim and offered more mundane explanations; most likely, these data do not reveal a new and distant biology. But the affair was still a watershed moment.

A Philosophy That Sees ‘Women as Doers’

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When a woman’s clothes constrict her movement, squeezing her into unforgiving shapes, or her exercise regime is a punishing ordeal meant to winnow her down to the smallest possible size, the result is all too often an alienation from her body.

Journalist Karen Hao on Sam Altman, OpenAI & the “Quasi-Religious” Push for Artificial Intelligence

As part of our July Fourth special broadcast, we continue our extended interview with Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. The book documents the rise of OpenAI and how the AI industry is leading to a new form of colonialism. “One of the things that you really have to understand about AI development today is that there are what I call quasi-religious movements that have developed within Silicon Valley,” says Hao.