TikTok clone Instagram Reels is just one of the many times Facebook has copied its competitors

Facebook’s TikTok knockoff, Instagram Reels, is making its big United States debut today. The feature is Instagram’s answer to TikTok, the wildly popular short-form video streaming app. It would be a big deal if this copycat product is as successful as Instagram Stories, but that’s hardly guaranteed.

Reels lets users make 15-second edited videos overlaid with music directly in their Stories, Feed, or a new Reels section in the Instagram Explore tab, as my Vox colleague Rebecca Jennings explains here. It’s a near clone of TikTok, which similarly lets people upload lip-sync videos. The timing of the US release …

Mortality, mass psychosis, and how we live today

The question has the ring of one posed by a street-corner preacher: If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, how would you spend today? Answers, presumably, will vary. You might visit your family, or break off a relationship, or go careening down the highway at top speed on your motorcycle. You might get incredibly drunk, or go to church, or hug your child. It’s just a thought experiment, but it’s a revealing one.

Wait, back up — is it a thought experiment? None of us know for sure that we’ll die tomorrow, but we also don’t know that …

The US needs real-time data to fight the pandemic. We’re still not even close.

Six months into America’s battle with Covid-19, we still can’t really see the enemy.

There isn’t good real-time data on where the virus is and who it is infecting. Our diagnostic testing is at an all-time high, but it’s still missing the vast majority of infections.

We don’t have systematic surveillance programs like we do for the flu to fill in the gaps, and we don’t have good metrics that tell us how well the virus is being contained. We’re particularly in the dark about what’s happening in many minority communities, which have lower testing rates than white communities. …

Missouri approves Medicaid expansion ballot initiative, extending coverage to 200,000 people

Missouri voters approved an expansion of the state’s Medicaid program in Tuesday’s election, according to Vox’s partners at Decision Desk — making another success story at the ballot box for the program in a state where it had been stifled by Republican opposition.

The ballot initiative expands Medicaid eligibility to 138 percent of the federal poverty level (about $17,500 for an individual or $30,000 for a family of three) as authorized under the Affordable Care Act. An estimated 230,000 low-income Missourians will become eligible for Medicaid, though that number could end up being even higher given the recent job losses …

Mulan is coming to Disney+ as a $30 rental

The coronavirus pandemic has trashed the entertainment industry, and one of its highest-profile targets has been Disney’s live-action adaptation of Mulan. Originally slated to release on March 27, the film’s theatrical debut was moved to July 24, then August 21, then taken off the calendar entirely.

But on an earnings call with investors, Disney executives announced that Mulan will be released on Disney+, the company’s streaming service, on September 4. It will come with a fee attached: Subscribers will pay an additional $29.99 to rent the film. In countries without Disney+ — including China, the country in which Mulan

Mask mandates are crucial for fighting Covid-19. How should they be enforced?

Though 33 states now have face mask mandates, Gov. Pete Ricketts says his state of Nebraska will not be joining them. On Monday, Ricketts doubled down on his conviction that a statewide mask mandate would be too “heavy-handed.”

“I don’t want to make it a crime,” he said at a press conference.

Ricketts’s resistance comes as his office is challenging mask ordinances in Lincoln and Lancaster County that have already gone into effect. Teachers’ unions, meanwhile, have called his failure to pass a statewide mask order a “dereliction of duty.”

“I would die for my students. Please don’t make …

How Portland’s Wall of Moms collapsed — and was reborn under Black leadership

Last Wednesday, the Wall of Moms Facebook group descended into chaos. One woman said a group of Black moms was left unprotected at a rally in downtown Portland, Oregon. Another claimed that group leader Bev Barnum had co-opted Black Lives Matter for her own gain. There were endless threads of comments from women disappointed that the protest group — made up of mothers and grandmothers who had gained international recognition for standing on the front line of the city’s protests — seemed to have lost its way.

The Wall of Moms, at least the original version, was collapsing. It had …

America needs a bar and restaurant bailout

You can’t eat a meal, down a shot, or sip a cup of coffee while wearing a mask.

So if wearing masks inside is crucial to halting the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic — and at this point, just about everyone in the scientific, medical, and public health communities agrees that it is — people can’t be eating or drinking in indoor settings outside the house.

Yet despite this seemingly straightforward logic, many jurisdictions in the US have allowed the partial reopening of bars, restaurants, and coffee shops.

In Washington, DC, for example, Mayor Muriel Bowser is sufficiently concerned about …

Last week the US wanted to break up Big Tech. Now it’s trying to supersize it.

Last week, US lawmakers hauled the heads of four giant tech companies into a virtual antitrust hearing, ostensibly over concerns their companies are too big.

This week, the president of the United States is sort-of-kind-of-maybe trying to help a different giant US tech company become even bigger — by forcing the Chinese owners of TikTok to sell it to Microsoft.

There are all kinds of perspectives on a potential sale of TikTok from ByteDance to Microsoft. Some rational people think it’s a good idea: They don’t want the popular social video app with a huge presence in …

Alabama’s and Mississippi’s troubling Covid-19 curves, briefly explained

For the first time in a while, there is a bit of good news to report about America’s coronavirus pandemic: Nationally, cases have plateaued — and in some places, they have begun to decline slightly.

But, as always is the case when looking at the national numbers, the situation is more complicated than it seems.

Over the last two weeks, the average number of new cases reported daily has dipped from more than 66,000 to roughly 60,000, according to the Covid Exit Strategy tracker. The number of people hospitalized with Covid-19 nationwide has also fallen in the last …