Today's Liberal News

Omicron Is Forcing Us to Rethink Mild COVID

When Delta swept across the United States last year, the extremely transmissible and deadlier variant threw us into pandemic limbo. The virus remained a danger mostly to unvaccinated people, but they largely wanted to move on. Vaccinated people also largely wanted to move on. The virus did not want to move on. So we got stuck in a deadly rut, and more Americans died of COVID-19 in 2021 than in 2020.

Gal Beckerman, Maya Chung, and Emma Sarappo Join The Atlantic as Editors, Kicking Off Books Expansion

The Atlantic is welcoming three new editors to the Culture team as it begins an expansion of Books coverage. Joining The Atlantic are Gal Beckerman as senior editor for Books, coming from The New York Times Book Review; Maya Chung as an associate editor, most recently with The New York Review of Books; and Emma Sarappo as an associate editor, previously the arts editor at Washington City Paper.

Nina Khrushcheva: Putin Could Be Kingmaker in Kazakhstan Power Struggle as Russia Helps Quell Protests

Kazakhstan’s authoritarian President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has described last week’s protests as an attempted coup and defended his call for Russian-led troops into the country to put down the unrest. Demonstrations were triggered by a rise in fuel prices and widened to broader anti-government protests. Over 160 people were killed in the violence, including a 4-year-old girl, and thousands were detained.

Putin Unlikely to Invade Ukraine Despite Overheated U.S. Rhetoric, Says Khrushchev’s Great-Granddaughter

U.S. and Russian officials are meeting today in Geneva as NATO calls on Russia to remove its troops from along the Ukrainian border. The Russian military has also mobilized soldiers to suppress protests in Kazakhstan. We go to Moscow to speak with Nina Khrushcheva, professor of international affairs at The New School, who says President Vladimir Putin is expanding Russia’s sphere of influence but will not invade Ukraine. “It’s not that he wants to take more territory.

The Art Movement That Embraced the Monstrous

To be on the internet today is to confront unsettling images—of war, climate change, humanitarian crises. Weird visuals crop up too. A YouTube algorithm provides me, for instance, with videos of a pimple-popping bonanza, or a series of videos in which young men eat glue.

Doing Grown-Up Tasks, in Millennial Slang

Sign up for Caleb’s newsletter here.English words constantly evolve, not only in terms of what they mean, but how they mean. They transform their parts of speech all the time without so much as a changed syllable. The adjective green came to mean the part of the golf course that can be described by this adjective. The prepositions up and down came to mean the experiences in life that feel like the spatial relationships that these prepositions describe—life’s ups and downs.

Even NASA Seems Surprised by Its New Space Telescope

To the world, the new telescope that recently launched to space is one of the most ambitious scientific endeavors in history. It is the next Hubble, designed to observe nearly everything from here to the most distant edges of the cosmos, to the very first galaxies.To Jane Rigby’s son, it’s “mama’s telescope.”Rigby, an astrophysicist, used to bring her young son to the NASA center in Maryland to watch the James Webb Space Telescope being assembled.

Sudan Protests Demand End to Military Rule: “No Negotiation, No Partnership, No Legitimacy”

We get an update from Sudan, where at least three pro-democracy protesters were killed by security forces on Thursday, bringing the death toll to at least 60 since the military coup on October 25. Thursday’s protest came four days following Abdalla Hamdok’s resignation as Sudan’s prime minister, after he was deposed in the October coup and then shortly restored to power by the military in November.

WHO Says Omicron Variant Is Not “Mild” as ER Doctor Describes New COVID Wave Overwhelming Hospitals

We look at the skyrocketing number of COVID infections. Coronavirus cases hit record highs this week, with global cases climbing 70% from last week to 9.5 million and the U.S. reporting a single-day record of 1 million new cases on Monday. In the U.S., the extraordinary volume of cases is filling up emergency rooms nationwide and exhausting healthcare workers, says emergency room physician Dr. Craig Spencer, who has been treating coronavirus patients since the pandemic began.

Reform the Insurrection Act: Former Pentagon Adviser Says Trump Almost Used It to Subvert Election

Former Pentagon adviser Ryan Goodman says former President Trump could have used the Insurrection Act to hold onto power during the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by his supporters. “There needs to be reform of the Insurrection Act,” says Goodman, who authored the report “Crisis of Command: The Pentagon, the President, and January 6” for Just Security, where he is co-editor.

News Roundup: Manhattan D.A. looks to reduce incarcerations; CDC director causes new fury

In the news today: Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is instituting new policies that will seek jail time only for the most serious offenses. That’s consistent with research showing that incarceration for minor crimes is both expensive and ineffective—but the city’s police commissioner is furious. A lawsuit accuses Facebook of abetting a murderous insurrectionist group with algorithms that effectively work as recruitment tools for those groups.

Glenn Beck announces he has COVID-19 while doing commercials for diet bars

Remember Glenn Beck? He’s still around and he’s still doing what he’s always done: grifting away. His modern look includes spectacles and a sort of Kentucky Fried Chicken Colonel Sanders look. Surprising no one, Beck’s evidence-free conspiracy theory stylings, now common on the right, are focused on all of the same tropes of misinformation, disinformation, and anti-vaxxer clickbait that allows for making money on his BlazeTV network.