Month: May 2020

Despite Congress’s approval of more than $720 billion to help small businesses during the pandemic, many businesses and nonprofits have been completely shut out of receiving this support.

A new bill from Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) aims to help fix this disparity: The Saving Our Street Act, which was shared exclusively with Vox, would allocate grants of up to $250,000 to businesses that have fewer than 10 employees.

The specific targeting of these “micro-businesses” is intended to ensure that smaller entities aren’t excluded from much-needed stimulus: Recent Small Business Administration data shows that …

Immigrant advocates are arguing in court that American citizens who are married to unauthorized immigrants should still be eligible for stimulus checks along with their children.

The $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, gives most taxpayers up to $1,200 and $500 for each of their children under the age of 17. But even if they pay taxes, unauthorized immigrants are not eligible for the stimulus checks, which the government started sending out in April. Neither is anyone else in their household, including their spouses and children, even if their spouses and children are US …

It seems like some countries have figured out not only how to flatten their coronavirus curves, but also how to send them plunging downward.

From Slovenia to Jordan to Iceland, governments took early action to impose lockdowns, test and trace thousands of people, isolate the sick, encourage social distancing and preventive measures like mask wearing, and communicate honestly with the public.

Those interventions curbed the number of new confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths, allowing leaders to reopen schools and businesses and reintroduce a sense of normalcy into everyday life. Some are now reporting no new confirmed cases or deaths.…

Airbnb, seen until recently as one of Silicon Valley’s most financially secure unicorns, is laying off a quarter of its staff. It’s an ominous sign for the tech economy.

Brian Chesky, the company’s founder and CEO, told staff on Tuesday that the company’s revenue would be halved and that it would terminate about 1,900 of its 7,500 staff members — one of the largest layoffs in total that Silicon Valley has seen since the Covid-19 pandemic struck. Airbnb’s decision serves as a stark reminder of the coronavirus’s toll, which has hamstrung the global economy, forcing almost all startups to …

Retail sales of plant-based food are taking off during the coronavirus pandemic. The last time I braved the grocery store, which was a few weeks ago, I unwittingly illustrated two of the main reasons why.

First, I went in search of eggs. The store was all out, but right above the shelf where I usually find them, I spied a bottle of Just Egg, the plant-based substitute made out of beans. I’d never had eggless eggs before, but now, out of necessity, I decided to try something new.

Then I walked through the meat aisle. There was still plenty …

Few Americans alive today have ever seen jobless numbers as bad as they are right now. Economists estimate that between 13 percent and 18 percent of US workers are unemployed — the highest rate since the Great Depression.

It’s tempting to see that figure as somewhat inevitable, the unfortunate but unavoidable cost of economic lockdown. It’s why Congress has prioritized shoring up unemployment insurance benefits.

But as a handful of European countries have shown, mass unemployment isn’t a given. It’s a policy choice.

In this video, we explain how and why the UK, Denmark, and the Netherlands chose a …

Hello from The Goods’ twice-weekly newsletter! On Tuesdays, internet culture reporter Rebecca Jennings uses this space to update you all on what’s been going on in the world of TikTok. Is there something you want to see more of? Less of? Different of? Email [email protected], and subscribe to The Goods’ newsletter here.

Nothing is certain except death, taxes, and gimmicky food videos, even in a pandemic. Remember a few weeks ago when everyone was making Dalgona coffee, a.k.a. cloud coffee, a.k.a. fluffy coffee? There is now another TikTok trend you can make with practically zero ingredients that …

Colson Whitehead has won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 2019 novel Nickel Boys. The win comes just three years after Whitehead won the Prize for his 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, making Whitehead the fourth writer ever to have won the Pulitzer for fiction twice.

The last time Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize, in April 2017, the award served as the crown jewel in a months-long coronation. The Underground Railroad, in which an enslaved woman makes a magical-realism-inflected journey out of the antebellum south, was easily 2016’s book of the year. In September of …

Update, May 4: New research from a group of political scientists affirms that mail-in voting in Colorado raised turnout more than 10 points among the most vulnerable demographics, including low-income voters, and benefited Republicans and Democrats equally. It’s powerful support for the argument that mail-in voting should be universally accessible for the November elections. The following piece, making that argument, was originally published on April 8, 2020.

The political climate in the US is tumultuous. The Covid-19 pandemic hangs over everything even as a dozen other issues — an oil crisis, a divided Democratic Party, and a corrupt, impeached president …