Month: October 2019

On October 31, the House of Representatives voted to approve its first resolution related to their impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. The resolution passed by a vote of 232 to 196, with Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN) and Jeff Van Drew (D-NJ) dissenting from their party to vote no. Former Republican Rep. Justin Amash (I-MI), who left the party earlier this year, joined Democrats to vote yes. All current Republicans voted no.

The resolution was a set of procedures proposed by Democratic leaders for how the impeachment inquiry will function going forward. And this vote paves the way for …

Either by design or stroke of luck, the Terminator franchise is set up brilliantly for logically explainable reboots. This isn’t a Hulk or Fantastic Four situation, where you just start all over again. In the time-traveling Terminator world invented by James Cameron in 1984, movies can easily be both sequels and reboots.

If assassins and heroes are traveling from the future to change events in the present, then the future keeps changing, which means those who travel from the future to the present are there to change different events in the present, and … well, you get the idea. There’s …

Netflix has ruled the streaming video world for years. Now Apple, Disney and other big companies are trying to change that: They’d like to claim some of the time and money you give to Netflix — which has nearly 160 million subscribers worldwide — and they’re going to spend billions trying to make it happen.

Which is why you’re hearing a lot right now about Apple’s new streaming service, which launches Friday, and Disney’s, which launches a couple of weeks after that. And you’ve probably heard about WarnerMedia’s new take on HBO, which will come online in May, but …

Halloween is a flashpoint for many of our deeply held and most arbitrary social fears. For a while, we all worried about whether unscrupulous homeowners were handing out poisonous, razor blade-filled candy (a myth that’s been roundly debunked); more recently that morphed into terror over pot-laced edibles slipped into trick-or-treaters’ bags (relax, nobody likes your kid enough to waste that kind of money on them). Halloween combines costumes, candy, strangers, and darkness — it’s practically a powder keg of worry.

A perennial source of that fretting? The question of how old is too old to run around in said …

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US students’ reading scores slip

• Reading scores of eighth graders nationwide fell in over half of all states, with a slight decline overall. [New York Times / Erica L. Green and Dana Goldstein]
• The National Assessment of Educational Progress exam marked declines in reading ability among all groups, but the biggest drop came from students with the lowest reading proficiency. [

Barack Obama is returning to the campaign trail for his first open event of the 2020 cycle, dropping in to Silicon Valley to raise money for the Democratic Party.

Obama will headline a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee in Los Altos Hills, California, on November 21, according to an invitation obtained by Recode. Ticket prices to the event run to as high as $355,000 to “chair” the event and as (relatively) low as $10,000 to simply attend the afternoon reception.

The event will be hosted at the home of Karla Jurvetson, a psychiatrist and ascendant Democratic fundraiser in Silicon …

On Thursday, House Democrats will vote on a resolution formally laying out the next steps and procedures of their impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.

Technically, House committees have been in the middle of an impeachment inquiry since September, but this vote marks the next big step, especially as lawmakers and committees move from closed-door depositions to public hearings.

As Vox’s Li Zhou explained, the resolution lays out five key aspects of committee procedures going forward, including detailing how the House Intelligence Committee will actually conduct public hearings, who will get to ask questions, and saying that the House …

We should be wary of a wealth tax because Henry Ford hated Jews.

That’s the argument Harvard economist and former director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers made on Twitter last Saturday, stirring up such a firestorm that he had to apologize and clarify.

His argument: Henry Ford was an anti-Semite. If there had been a wealth tax in his day, he might have spent his money instead of leaving it to a foundation vulnerable to such a tax. Instead of his fortune going to the Ford Foundation, which went on to support many worthwhile causes, he would …

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North Carolina court orders new map

• A North Carolina state court has thrown out the state’s Republican-drawn map of congressional districts — ordering the state to draw a new map, even if that means postponing the 2020 primary elections. [The New York Times / Michael Wines]
• This isn’t the first time this year that North Carolina’s legislative maps have lost in

WarnerMedia’s new HBO Max streaming service, which will feature all of HBO’s programming plus new shows, and repeats of old ones like Friends, will launch in May, and cost $15 a month — the same price that the existing HBO service costs.

That is: WarnerMedia wants the 30 million-plus subscribers to HBO (in the US) to convert to HBO Max subscribers — the decision will be an “IQ test,” in the words of WarnerMedia boss John Stankey — and to make the new service appealing to people who haven’t yet signed up for HBO.

It’s an expensive and potentially …