Month: April 2020

The evening before her DC-bound flight on April 26, Libby L. called American Airlines to inquire how full the plane would be. The 29-year-old New York City resident, who declined to share her last name for privacy reasons, wanted to know if she would have another passenger sitting beside her and if the airline would seat travelers according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social distancing guidelines. She was heading to the DC metropolitan area to stay indefinitely with her mom, who’s recovering from severe laryngitis.

“I was told American Airlines was doing their best to social distance …

Even as adults, it can be difficult to parse through the torrent of news and information about the coronavirus without feeling fear, anxiety, or discomfort. For those who are parents or caretakers of a young child, they don’t just have their own physical and mental health to worry about; they have kids to take care of, too. And those kids have a lot of questions.

As a result, parenting articles on navigating Covid-19 have popped up across the internet over the past few weeks and months, with titles like “How to talk to kids about coronavirus.” Vox has a …

As people around the world are shut in their homes under lockdown, they’re using Facebook more than ever to share news, message their friends, and find entertaining distractions from the dullness of quarantine life.

But that doesn’t mean Facebook, or other social media companies like Twitter and Snap, are making more money.

On Wednesday, in Facebook’s first earnings statement since the pandemic hit, the company shared impressive statistics: Nearly 3 billion people now use at least one of Facebook’s apps (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or WhatsApp) each month, an 11 percent increase year over year and the highest it’s ever been. …

Against the backdrop of the novel coronavirus pandemic, Megan Thee Stallion’s 2019 anthem “Hot Girl Summer” has been in heavy rotation on my Spotify account. The song has become an essential part of my personal quarantine soundtrack, and I think it should be part of yours, too. Don’t let the fact that it’s not summer, or that you don’t feel like your best “hot girl” self, or that you haven’t attended anything remotely resembling a party in months stop you from enjoying this song for a second longer.

Let me explain.

A quick refresher on where you may already …

Amazon’s corporate employees have started to question the e-commerce giant’s business and labor practices more than ever before. In response, the company appears to be cracking down.

This week, Recode has learned that Amazon has started strictly enforcing rules that limit its employees’ internal communications with each other on several large company email listservs, where workers have been criticizing how the company is treating its warehouse workers during the coronavirus pandemic and have organized protests in response.

On Monday, Amazon’s IT department notified some employees who manage listservs of more than 500 people that they are required to have employee …

The Apple-Google coronavirus exposure notification tool is one step closer to its planned mid-May release. On Wednesday, the companies announced that a beta version of the application programming interface (API) is being released to developers for the public health authorities who will be incorporating the tool into their digital contact tracing efforts.

As contact tracing becomes an increasingly hot topic in the Covid-19 pandemic, details of the new tool built by Apple and Google are coming into focus. In late April, the companies offered updates that included a closer look at how the tool will work on smartphones, information …

Next Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear a pair of cases, Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania and Trump v. Pennsylvania, which could write the final chapter in a multi-year struggle over whether employers with religious objections to birth control may deny insurance coverage of contraceptives to their employees.

With two Trump appointees occupying seats on the Supreme Court, the Court is now far more conservative than it was four years ago, when a similar birth control case reached the justices. It is likely, in other words, that religious conservatives can look forward to a big win …

Rep. Justin Amash (I-MI), a libertarian House representative and frequent critic of Donald Trump’s presidency, announced his intention on Tuesday to launch an exploratory committee to examine a run for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination.

The announcement was not a surprise, as Amash paused campaigning for his Congressional seat to “carefully consider a presidential run” back on April 15th. On …

On April 19, the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, completed construction of a 500-bed field hospital for coronavirus patients at the Riocentro convention center. It’s one of several such hospitals being built in Rio de Janeiro to deal with the growing outbreak there. The state has more than 6,700 confirmed coronavirus cases and more than 670 deaths as of April 28.

That same day, on April 19, Brazil’s right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro joined a protest outside army headquarters in Brasilia, the country’s capital. There, protesters supported military intervention and demanded an end to lockdown measures state governors in the …