Day: January 27, 2020

Amid reports that President Donald Trump is planning to expand his travel ban, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is sending a message: She announced Monday that the House will hold a vote in the coming weeks on a bill that would dismantle it altogether.

The bill, known as the National Origin-Based Anti-discrimination for Nonimmigrants (NO BAN) Act, would repeal Trump’s travel ban on citizens of seven countries and limit the president’s authority to issue such sweeping bans in the future. It would also strengthen existing prohibitions on religious discrimination with respect to visa applications guaranteed by the Immigration …

It’s 2020. How come the Washington Post is screwing up at Twitter?

That’s the rough paraphrase coming at me today from my colleagues and from Twitter. Everyone wants to know why the Post has punished one of its reporters for tweeting about Kobe Bryant after his death yesterday.

My answer: It’s 2020, and Twitter — really, all of social media — remains something that media companies of all stripes can and will screw up. Because humans are messy, and social media, among other things, is built to exploit that mess. The situation won’t get better unless media companies ban …

Faced with the news that President Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s new book includes an account that undercuts one of Trump’s central impeachment defenses, Fox News and the Trump-supporting Republicans who regularly appear on it went all-in on smearing him as a greedy and disgruntled former aide who only wants sell more copies.

Take host Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who joined Monday’s edition of Fox & Friends and said, “The timing is a little interesting, isn’t it?”

This particularly talking point was utterly foreseeable — I predicted on Sunday night that it would get heavy play on …

In late December, when China first announced its outbreak of a mysterious pneumonia, officials in the country were quite clear on a few things.

Most of the patients had been exposed to a food market in Wuhan, the city that’s still the epicenter of the outbreak, according to local health authorities. The earliest case had symptoms just two weeks earlier, on December 12. There was also “no clear evidence” of human to human transmission, meaning the virus wasn’t yet spreading from one person to another. That suggested people might have been getting sick directly from animals in the …

The Grammy Awards hand out trophies in more than 80 categories, honoring artists across all genres. But the four biggest categories — Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best New Artist — all went to just one artist this year: Billie Eilish.

Eilish took the stage wearing her trademark oversized, androgynous couture and neon green roots to collect all six of the awards that she and her brother/producer/co-writer, Finneas O’Connell, were nominated for. (She also won Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical.) It was a historic sweep, and not …

The Grammy Awards hand out trophies in more than 80 categories, honoring artists across all genres. But the four biggest categories — Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best New Artist — tend to skew toward the poppier side of the musical spectrum.

That’s not an indictment, especially because there was a particularly strong set of pop star nominees for the 2020 awards. Lizzo, Billie Eilish, Lil Nas X, and Ariana Grande dominated both the overall nominations slate and the four top categories — fitting considering how they ruled the …