The Trump administration will now allow doctors to discriminate against LGBTQ people

The Trump administration has finalized a Department of Health and Human Services administrative rule rolling back health care discrimination protections for LGBTQ people, according to an HHS press release. The rule was released Friday, June 12, the fourth anniversary of the Pulse shooting, which left 49 victims, including many queer and trans people, dead in an Orlando, Florida, nightclub.

First proposed in May 2019, the rule reverses an Obama-era interpretation that sex discrimination under Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act applied to discrimination against queer and trans people, as well as people who are seeking or have …

In This Time of Social Change, Can a Brand Also Be an Ally?

A symptom of brands sounding more and more like people is that we more frequently look to companies to mirror our ideologies. Coconut water is expected to clap back at people who pronounce a distaste for it on Twitter, it’s not surprising when Steak-Umm’s social media accounts rant about cognitive dissonance, or for Popeyes and Chick-fil-A to fight publicly and pettily about who has the better fried chicken sandwich. But, no matter how surreal it is to watch companies pivot their voice in the hopes of seeming more human, what remains is that, well, they’re not. Brands are not people, …

Recording the Company cast album was infamously hellish. This cult favorite doc captured it all.

“My phone rang. It was Danny Melnick from David Suskind’s office with another idea.”

Thus runs the delightfully smug opening line of 1970’s Original Cast Album: “Company,” in a text crawl for maximum gravitas. You’re not supposed to know anyone referenced here; in fact, none of these people actually have anything to do with the making of the original cast album of Company, which the documentary sets out to capture. But that opening sentence is enough to imply that if you were anybody worth your salt, you would know, which is just the kind of secret handshaking you’d …

The emerging long-term complications of Covid-19, explained

At first, Lauren Nichols tried to explain away her symptoms. In early March, the healthy 32-year-old felt an intense burning sensation, like acid reflux, when she breathed. Embarrassed, she didn’t initially seek medical care. When her shortness of breath kept getting worse, her doctor tested her for Covid-19.

Her results came back positive. But for Nichols, that was just the beginning. Over the next eight weeks, she developed wide and varied symptoms, including extreme and chronic fatigue, diarrhea, nausea, tremors, headaches, difficulty concentrating, and short-term memory loss.

“The guidelines that were provided by the CDC [Centers for Disease Control …

Why the Trump administration is sanctioning a top international court

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday sanctioning members of the International Criminal Court, the global judicial body investigating American troops for possible war crimes during the Afghanistan war.

The provocative move targets court staff involved in the probe, as well as their families, blocking them from accessing assets held in US financial institutions and from visiting America. Top members of the Trump administration — including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper — made the announcement with surprisingly forceful language to make their point.

“We cannot allow ICC officials and their families to come …

Inside Jack Dorsey’s radical experiment for billionaires to give away their money

Billionaires are notoriously bad at something that should be quite easy: giving away their money.

In the pantheon of the ultra-rich, Jack Dorsey, as the world’s 410th-wealthiest person, is hardly the stingiest offender. But he has now kick-started one of the most radical experiments in this era of historic income inequality — whether it is possible to quickly give away more than $1 billion of his money, and to do it effectively. Dorsey is putting the lie to the claim from billionaires that this is impossible and that they need enormous teams, decades of deep study, total privacy, and, …

Big tech companies back away from selling facial recognition to police. That’s progress.

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Microsoft president Brad Smith announced on Thursday that his company did not sell facial recognition to the police, and would not until the government passes federal legislation regulating the technology. His statement follows a Wednesday announcement from Amazon explaining that the company would institute a one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition, the company’s facial recognition software.

That change also comes after IBM’s announcement earlier this week that the company would no longer offer facial recognition products, citing the technology’s potential for abuse or misuse. As scrutiny of law enforcement ramps up, it looks as though there could be …

Meet the Romney-Gary Johnson-Bloomberg voter who’s embracing Black Lives Matter

Last Tuesday, I tweeted out a photo of a truck parked in downtown Washington, DC, not far from the White House and the protests against police brutality and the killing of George Floyd that had engulfed the city.

It was the bumper stickers on the back of the late-model Toyota Tacoma that made me do it. They showed what seemed to be a political evolution of sorts, mirroring one that many Americans may be having in 2020: from a 2000 sticker for John McCain’s failed presidential campaign to a sticker supporting Mitt Romney’s candidacy in 2012 to ones supportive of …

Do the soaring sales of anti-racism books signal a true cultural shift?

In the wake of the waves of police brutality at protests against the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other black people, Americans are turning to books to try to understand the United States’ history of structural and institutional racism. Over the past month, sales of books about anti-racism have surged dramatically.

Every one of the 10 books on the New York Times’s combined e-book and print nonfiction best-seller list this week is about anti-racism. The Times’s fiction list is topped by Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, a just-released novel by a black author about race and …

Chuck Schumer warns that delays to stimulus will disproportionately hurt black Americans 

If statements from Senate Republicans are any indication, the timeline for the next stimulus package just keeps on slipping.

While lawmakers had previously argued that it could get done before the Senate leaves for a July Fourth recess, several have since said that’s no longer likely. “End of July … is frankly my sense of when I think we’ll have all the information we need to put the next bill together,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) told Politico this week.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, in a letter provided exclusively to Vox, is urging Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and …